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W^ tl&e S)ame Siutl^or 



The American Mind 

Park-Street Papers 

John Greenleaf Whittier : A Memoir 

Walt Whitman 

The Amateur Spirit 

A Study of Prose Fiction 

The Powers at Play 

The Plated City 

Salem Kittredge and Other Stories 

The Broughton House 



The American Mind 

T^he E. T. Ear/ Lectures 
1912 






COPYRIGHT, I912, BY BLISS PERRY 
ALL RIGHTS RKSERVBD 

Published October iQis 



£CI,A327487 



TO 

WALTER MORRIS HART 



Preface 

The material for this book was delivered as 
the E, 'T, Earl Lectures for igi2 at the Pacific 
^theological Seminary^ Berkeley^ California^ and 
I wish to take this opportunity to express to the 
President and Faculty of that institution my ap- 
preciation of their generous hospitality, 

^he lectures were also given at the Lowell 
Institute, Boston, the Brooklyn Institute, and 
elsewhere, under the title ^^ American 'Traits in 
American Literature^ In revising them for pub- 
lication a briefer title has seemed desirable, and 
I have therefore availed myself of Jefferson s 
phrase ^^The American Mind,'^ as suggesting, 
more accurately perhaps than the original title, 
the real theme of discussion, 

B. P. 

Cambridge, 191 2. 



Contents 



I. Race, Nation, and Book . . 3 

II. The American Mind . . '47 

III. American Idealism . . * 86 

IV. Romance and Reaction . . .128 
V. Humor and Satire. . . .166 

VI. Individualism and Fellowship . . 209 



The American Mind 



Race, Nation, and Book 

Many years ago, as a student In a foreign uni- 
versity, I remember attacking, with the com- 
placency of youth, a German history of the 
English drama, in six volumes. I lost courage 
long before the author reached the age of Eliz- 
abeth, but I still recall the subject of the opening 
chapter : it was devoted to the physical geography 
of Great Britain. Writing, as the good German 
professor did, in the triumphant hour of Taine's 
theory as to the significance of place, period> 
and environment in determining the character 
of any literary production, what could be more 
logical than to begin at the beginning ? Have 
not the chalk cliffs guarding the southern coast 
of England, have not the fatness of the midland 
counties and the soft rainy climate of a North 
Atlantic island, and the proud, tenacious, self- 
assertive folk that are bred there, all left their 
trace upon A Midsummer NigMs Dream^ and 

[3] 



The American Mind 

Every Man in bis Humour a.nd She Stoops to Con- 
quer ? Undoubtedly. Latitude and longitude, 
soil and rainfall and food-supply, racial origins 
and crossings, political and social and economic 
conditions, must assuredly leave their marks 
upon the mental and artistic productiveness of 
a people and upon the personality of individual 
writers. 

Taine, who delighted to point out all this, and 
whose English Literature remains a monument 
of the defects as well as of the advantages of 
his method, was of course not the inventor of 
the climatic theory. It is older than Aristotle, 
who discusses it in his treatise on Politics. It 
was a topic of interest to the scholars of the Re- 
naissance. Englishmen of the seventeenth cent- 
ury, with an unction of pseudo-science added to 
their natural patriotism, discovered in the Eng- 
lish climate one of the reasons of England's 
greatness. Thomas Sprat, writing in 1667 on 
the History of the Royal Society, waxes bold and 
asserts : "If there can be a true character given 
of the Universal Temper of any Nation under 
Heaven, then certainly this must be ascribed 
to our countrymen, that they have commonly 
an unaffected sincerity, that they love to de- 

[4] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

liver their minds with a sound simplicity, that 
they have the middle qualities between the re- 
served, subtle southern and the rough, unhewn 
northern people, that they are not extremely 
prone to speak, that they are more concerned 
what others will think of the strength than of 
the fineness of what they say, and that a uni- 
versal modesty possesses them. These qualities 
are so conspicuous and proper to the soil that 
we often hear them objected to us by some of 
our neighbor Satyrists in more disgraceful ex- 
pressions. . . . Even the position of our cli- 
mate, the air, the influence of the heaven, the 
compositionof the English blood, as well as the 
embraces of the Ocean, seem to join with the 
labours of the Royal Society to render our coun- 
try a Land of Experimental Knowledge.'* 

The excellent Sprat was the friend and exec- 
utor of the poet Cowley, who has in the Preface 
to his Poems a charming passage about the rela- 
tion of literature to the external circumstances 
in which it is written. 

" \iwit be such a Plant that it scarce receives 
heat enough to keep it alive even in the summer 
of our cold C/y»^^/^, how can it choose but wither 
in a long and a sharp winter ? a warlike, various 

[ 5 ] 



The American Mind 

and a tragical age is best to write of^ but worst 
to write iny And he adds this, concerning his 
own art of poetry : "There is nothing that re- 
quires so much serenity and chearfulness of 
spirit; it must not be either overwhelmed with 
the cares o^ Life, or overcast with the Clouds of 
Melancholy and Sorrow, or shaken and disturbed 
with the storms of injurious Fortune ; it must, 
like the Halcyon, have fair weather to breed in. 
/The Soul must be filled with bright and delight- 
ful Idaeas, when it undertakes to communicate 
delight to others, which is the main end oiFoe- 
sie. One may see through the stile of Ovid de 
Trist., the humbled and dejected condition of 
Spirit with which he wrote it ; there scarce re- 
mains any footstep of that Genius, ^em nee 
Jovis ira, nee ignes, etc. The cold of the coun- 
try has strucken through all his faculties, and 
benummed the vtry feet of his Verses'^ 

Madame de Stael's Germany, one of the most 
famous ofthe" national character*' books, begins 
with a description of the German landscape. 
But though nobody, from Ovid in exile down 
to Madame de Stael, questions the general sig- 
nificance of place, time, and circumstances as 
affecting the nature of a literary product, when 

[6] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

we come to the exact and as It were mathemati- 
cal demonstration of the precise workings of 
these physical influences, our generation is dis- 
tinctly more cautious than were the literary crit- 
ics of forty years ago. Indeed, it is a hundred 
years since Fisher Ames, ridiculing the theory 
that climate acts directly upon literary products, 
said wittily of Greece : " The figs are as fine as 
ever, but where are the Pindars ? '* The theory 
of race, in particular, has been sharply ques- 
tioned by the experts. " Saxon " and " Norman," 
for example, no longer seem to us such simple 
terms as sufficed for the purpose of Scott's Ivan- 
hoe or of Thierry's Norman Conquest, a book 
inspired by Scott's romance. The late Profes- 
sor Freeman, with characteristic bluntness, 
remarked of the latter book : " Thierry says at 
the end of his work that there are no longer ei- 
ther Normans or Saxons except in history. . . . 
But in Thierry's sense of the word, it would 
be truer to say that there never were * Nor- 
mans ' or ' Saxons' anywhere, save in the pages 
of romances like his own." 

There is a brutal directness about this ver- 
dict upon a rival historian which we shall pro- 
bably persist in calling " Saxon " ; but it is no 

[7] 



The American Mind 

worse than the criticisms of Matthew Arnold's 
essay on "The Celtic Spirit'* made to-day by 
university professors who happen to know 
Old Irish at first hand, and consequently con- 
sider Arnold's opinion on Celtic matters to be 
hopelessly amateurish. 

The wiser scepticism of our day concerning 
all hard-and-fast racial distinctions has been ad- 
mirably summed up by Josiah Royce. "A race 
psychology/' he declares, " is still a science for 
the future to discover. . . . We do not scien- 
tifically know what the true racial varieties of 
mental type really are. No doubt there are such 
varieties. The judgment day, or the science of 
the future, may demonstrate what they are. We 
are at present very ignorant regarding the whole 
matter." 

Nowhere have the extravagances of the ap- 
plication of racial theories to intellectual pro- 
ducts been more pronounced than in the fields 
of art and literature. Audiences listen to a waltz 
which the programme declares to be an adapta- 
tion of a Hungarian folk-song, and though they 
may be more ignorant of Hungary than Shake- 
speare was of Bohemia, they have no hesitation 
in exclaiming : " How truly Hungarian this 

[8] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

Is ! " Or, it may be, how truly " Japanese " is 
this vase which was made in Japan — perhaps 
for the American market; or how intensely 
" Russian " is this melancholy tale by Turge- 
niefF. This prompt deduction of racial qualities 
from works of art which themselves give the 
critic all the information he possesses about the 
races in question, — or. In other words, the en- 
thusiastic assertion that a thing is like itself, — 
is one of the familiar notes of amateur criticism. 
It is travelling in a circle, and the corregiosity 
of Corregio is the next station. 

Blood tells, no doubt, and a masterpiece us- 
ually betrays some token of the place and hour 
of its birth. A knowledge of the condition of 
political parties in Athens in 416 B.C. adds im- 
mensely to the enjoyment of the readers of Aris- 
tophanes ; the fun becomes funnier and the dar- 
ing even more splendid than before. Moliere's 
training as an actor does affect the dramaturgic 
quality of his comedies. All this Is demonstra- 
ble, and to the prevalent consciousness of it our 
generation is deeply indebted to Taine and his 
pupils. But before displaying dogmatically the 
inevitable brandings of racial and national traits 
on a national literature, before pointing to this 

[9] 



The American Mind 

and that unmistakable evidence of local or tem- 
poral influence on the form or spirit of a master- 
piece, we are now inclined to make some distinct 
reservations. These reservations are not with- 
out bearing upon our own literature in America. 

There are, for instance, certain artists who 
seem to escape the influences of the time-spirit. 
The most familiar example is that of Keats. He 
can no doubt be assigned to the George the 
Fourth period by a critical examination of his 
vocabulary, but the characteristic political and 
social movements of that epoch in England left 
him almost untouched. Edgar Allan Poe might 
have written some of his tales in the seventeenth 
century or in the twentieth; he might, like 
Robert Louis Stevenson, have written in Samoa 
rather than in the Baltimore, Philadelphia, or 
New York of his day ; his description of the 
Ragged Mountains of Virginia, within very 
sight of the university which he attended, was 
borrowed, in the good old convenient fashion, 
from Macaulay ; in fact, it requires something 
of Poe*s own ingenuity to find in Poe, who is 
one of the indubitable assets of American liter- 
ature, anything distinctly American. 

Wholly aside from such spiritual insulation 
C lo] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

of the single writer, there is the obvious fact 
that none of the arts, not even literature, and 
not all of them together, can furnish a wholly- 
adequate representation of racial or national 
characteristics. It is well known to-day that the 
so-called "classic "examples of Greek art, most 
of which were brought to light and discoursed 
upon by critics from two to four centuries ago, 
represent but a single phase of Greek feeling; 
and that the Greeks, even in what we choose to 
call their most characteristic period, had a dis- 
tinctly "romantic" tendency which their more 
recently discovered plastic art betrays. But even 
if we had all the lost statues, plays, poems, and 
orations, all the Greek paintings about which 
we know so little, and the Greek music about 
which we know still less, does anybody suppose 
that this wealth of artistic expression would fur- 
nish a wholly satisfactory notion of the racial 
and psychological traits of the Greek people ? 
One may go even further. Does a truly 
national art exist anywhere, — an art, that is to 
say, which conveys a trustworthy and adequate 
expression of the national temper as a whole? 
We have but to reflect upon the European and 
American judgments, during the last thirty 

[ " ] 



The American Mind 

years, concerning the representative quality of 
the art of Japan, and to observe how many of 
those facile generalizations about the Japanese 
character, deduced from vases and prints and 
enamel, were smashed to pieces by the Russo- 
Japanese War. This may illustrate the blun- 
ders of foreign criticism, perhaps, rather than 
any inadequacy in the racially representative 
character of Japanese art. But it is impossible 
that critics, and artists themselves, should not 
err, in the conscious endeavor to pronounce 
upon the infinitely complex materials with which 
they are called upon to deal. We must confess 
that the expression of racial and national char- 
acteristics, by means of only one art, such as lit- 
erature, or by all the arts together, is at best im- 
perfect, and is always likely to be misleading 
unless corroborated by other evidence. 

For it is to be remembered that in literature, 
as in the other fields of artistic activity, we are 
dealing with the question of form ; of securing 
a concrete and pleasurable embodiment of cer- 
tain emotions. It may well happen that litera- 
ture not merely fails to give an adequate report 
of the racial or national or personal emotions 
felt during a given epoch, but that it fails to re- 

[ 12] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

port these emotions at all. Not only the "old, 
unhappy, far-ofF" things of racial experience, 
but the new and delight-giving experiences of 
the hour, may lack their poet. Widespread 
moods of public elation or wistfulness or de- 
pression have passed without leaving a shadow 
upon the mirror of art. There was no one to 
hold the mirror or even to fashion it. No note 
of Renaissance criticism, whether in Italy, 
France, or England, is more striking, and in a 
way more touching, than the universal feeling 
that in the rediscovery of the classics men had 
found at last the " terms of art," the rules and 
methods of a game which they had longwished 
to be playing. Englishmen and Frenchmen of 
the sixteenth century will not allow that their 
powers are less virile, their emotions less eager, 
than those of the Greeks and Romans. Only, 
lacking the very terms of art, they had not been 
able to arrive at fit expression ; the soul had 
found no body wherewith to clothe itself into 
beauty. As they avowed in all simplicity, they 
needed schoolmasters ; the discipline of Aris- 
totle and Horace and Virgil ; a body of critical 
doctrine, to teach them how to express the 
France and England or Italy of their day, and 

[ 13] 



The American Mind 

thus give permanence to their fleeting vision of 
the world. Naive as may have been the Renais- 
sance expression of this need of formal training, 
blind as it frequently was to the beauty which 
we recognize in the undisciplined vernacular lit- 
eratures of mediaeval Europe, those groping 
scholars were essentially right. No one can 
paint or compose by nature. One must slowly 
master an art of expression. 

Now through long periods of time, and over 
many vast stretches of territory, as our own 
American writing abundantly witnesses, the 
whole formal side of expression may be ne- 
glected. " Literature,** in its narrower sense, 
may not exist. In that restricted and higher 
meaning of the term, literature has always been 
uncommon enough, even in Athens or Flor- 
ence. It demands not merely personal distinc- 
tion or power, not merely some uncommon 
height or depth or breadth of capacity and in- 
sight, but a purely artistic training, which in the 
very nature of the case is rare. Millions of Rus- 
sians, perhaps, have felt about the general pro- 
blems of life much as TurgeniefF felt, but they 
lacked the sheer literary art with which the 
Notes of a Sportsman was written. Thousands of 

[ h] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

frontier lawyers and politicians shared Lincoln's 
hard and varied and admirable training in the 
mastery of speech, but in his hands alone was 
the weapon wrought to such perfection of tem- 
per and weight and edge that he spoke and 
wrote literature without knowing it. 

Such considerations belong, I am aware, to 
the accepted commonplaces, — perhaps to what 
William James used to call "the unprofitable 
delineation of the obvious." Everybody recog- 
nizes that literary gifts imply an exceptionally 
rich development of general human capacities, 
together with a professional aptitude and train- 
ing of which but few men are capable. There is 
but one lumberman in camp who can play the 
fiddle, though the whole camp can dance. Thus 
the great book, we are forever saying, is truly" 
representative of myriads of minds in a certain 
degree of culture, although but one man could 
have written it. The writing member of a fam- 
ily is often the one who acquires notoriety and 
a bank account, but he is likely to have can- 
did friends who admit, though not always in his 
presence, that, aside from this one professional 
gift and practice, he is not intellectually or emo- 
tionally or spiritually superior to his brothers 

[ 15] 



The American Mind 

and sisters. Waldo Emerson thought him- 
self the intellectual inferior of his brother 
Charles ; and good observers loved to maintain 
that John Holmes was wittier than Oliver 
Wendell, and Ezekiel Webster a better lawyer 
than Daniel. 

Applied to the literary history of a race, this 
principle is suggestive. We must be slow to af- 
firm that, because certain ideas and feelings did 
not attain, in this or that age or place, to purely 
literary expression, they were therefore not in 
existence. The men and women of the colonial 
period in our own country, for instance, have 
been pretty uniformly declared to have been 
deficient in the sense of beauty. What is the evi- 
dence ? It is mostly negative. They produced 
no poetry, fiction, painting, sculpture, or music 
worthy of the name. They were predominantly 
Puritan, and the whole world has been informed 
that English Puritanism was hostile to Art. 
They were preoccupied with material and moral 
concerns. Even if they had remained in Eng- 
land, Professor Trent affirms, these contempo- 
raries of Milton and Bunyan would have pro- 
duced no art or literature. Now it is quite true 
that for nearly two hundred years after the date 

[ i6] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

of the first settlement of the American colonists, 
opportunities for cultivating the arts did not 
exist. But that the sense of beauty was wholly 
atrophied, I, for one, do not believe. The pas- 
sionate eagerness with which the forefathers ab- 
sorbed the noblest of all poetry and prose in the 
pages oftheir one book, the Bible; theunwearled 
curiosity and care with which those farmers and 
fishermen and woodsmen read the signs of the 
sky; their awe of the dark wilderness and their 
familiar traffic with the great deep ; the silences 
of lonely places ; the opulence of primeval 
meadows by the clear streams ; the English 
flowers that were made to bloom again In farm- 
house windows and along garden walks; the 
inner visions, more lovely still, of duty and of 
moral law ; the spirit of sacrifice ; the daily walk 
with God, whether by green pastures of the 
spirit or through ways that were dark and ter- 
rible ; — is there in all this no discipline of the 
soul In moral beauty, and no tralningof the eye 
to perceive the exquisite harmonies of the visi- 
ble earth ? It is true that the Puritans had no 
professional men of letters ; It is true that doc- 
trinal sermons provided their chief intellectual 
sustenance ; true that their lives were stern, and 

C 17] 



The American Mind 

that many of the softer emotions were repressed. 
But beauty may still be traced in the fragments 
of their recorded speech, in their diaries and 
letters and phrases of devotion. You will search 
the eighteenth century of old England in vain 
for such ecstasies of wonder at the glorious 
beauty of the universe as were penned by Jona- 
than Edwards in his youthful Diary, There is 
every presumption, from what we know of the 
two men, that Whittier's father andgrandfather 
were peculiarly sensitive to the emotions of 
home and neighborhood and domesticity which 
their gifted descendant — too physically frail 
to be absorbed in the rude labor of the farm — 
has embodied in Snow-Bound, The Quaker 
poet knew that he surpassed his forefathers in 
facility in verse-making, but he would have been 
2im\x?>td(2i^\\\s Margaret Smith' s Journal^roYts) 
at the notion that his ancestors were without a 
sense of beauty or that they lacked responsive- 
ness to the chords of fireside sentiment. He 
was simply the only Whittier, except his sister 
Elizabeth, who had ever found leisure, as old- 
fashioned correspondents used to say, " to take 
his pen in hand." This leisure developed in him 
the sense — latent no doubt in his ancestors — 

[i8] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

of the beauty of words, and the excitement 
of rhythm. Emerson's Journal m the eighteen- 
thirties glows with a Dionysiac rapture over 
what he calls "deHcious days''; but did the 
seven generations of clergymen from whom 
Emerson descended have no delicious and 
haughty and tender days that passed unre- 
corded ? Formal literature perpetuates and 
glorifies many aspects of individual and national 
experience ; but how much eludes it wholly, or 
is told, if at all, in broken syllables, in Pente- 
costal tongues that seem to be our own and yet 
are unutterably strange ! 

To confess thus that literature, in the proper 
sense of the word, represents but a narrow seg- 
ment of personal or racial experience, is very 
far from a denial of the genuineness and the 
significance of the affirmations which literature 
makes. We recognize instinctively that Whit- 
tier's Snow-Bound is a truthful report, not merely 
of a certain farmhouse kitchen in East Haver- 
hill, Massachusetts, during the early nineteenth 
century, but of a mode of thinking and feeling 
which is widely diffused wherever the Anglo- 
Saxon race has wandered. Perhaps Snow-Bound 
lacks a certain universality of suggestiveness 

[ 19] 



The American Mind 

which belongs to a still more famous poem, The 
Cotter s Saturday Night of Burns, but both of 
these portrayals of rustic simplicity and peace 
owe their celebrity to their truly representative 
character. They are evidence furnished by a 
single art, as to a certain mode and coloring of 
human existence ; but every corroboration of 
that evidence heightens our admiration for the 
artistic sincerity and insight of the poet. To 
draw an illustration from a more splendid epoch, 
let us remind ourselves that the literature of 
the " spacious times of great Elizabeth " — a 
period of strong national excitement, and one 
deeply representative of the very noblest and 
most permanent traits of English national char- 
acter — was produced within startlingly few 
years and in a local territory extremely limited. 
The very language in which that literature is 
clothed was spoken only by the court, by a cou- 
ple of counties, and at the two universities. Its 
prose and verse were frankly experimental. It 
is true that such was the emotional ferment of 
the score of years preceding the Armada, that 
great captains and voyagers who scarcely wrote 
a line were hailed as kings of the realm of im- 
agination, and that Puttenham, in phrases which 

[ 20] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

that generation could not have found extrava- 
gant, inscribes his book on Poetry to Queen 
Elizabeth as the " most excellent Poet '* of the 
age. Well, the glorified political images may- 
grow dim or tawdry with time, but the poetry 
has endured, and it is everywhere felt to be a 
truly national, a deeply racial product. Its time 
and place and hour were all local ; but the Ca- 
nadian and the American, the South African 
and Australasian Englishman feels that that 
Elizabethan poetry is his poetry still. 

When we pass, therefore, as we must shortly 
do, to the consideration of this and that literary 
product of America, and to the scrutiny of the 
really representative character of our books, we 
must bear in mind that the questions concerning 
the race, the place, the hour, the man, — ques- 
tions so familiar to modern criticism, — remain 
valid and indeed essential; but that in apply- 
ing them to American writing there are cer- 
tain allowances, qualifications, adjustments of 
the scale of values, which are no less important 
to an intelligent perception of the quality of our 
literature. This task is less simple than the crit- 
ical assessment of a typical German or French 
or Scandinavian writer, where the strain of blood 

[ 21 ] 



The American Mind 

is unmixed, the continuity of literary tradition 
unbroken, the precise impact of historical and 
personal influences more easy to estimate. I 
open, for example, any one of half a dozen 
French studies of Balzac. Here is a many-sided 
man, a multifarious writer, a personality that 
makes ridiculous the merely formal pigeon- 
holing and labelling processes of professional 
criticism. And yet with what perfect precision 
of method and certainty of touch do Le Breton, 
for example, or Brunetiere, in their books on 
Balzac, proceed to indicate those impulses of 
race and period and environment which affected 
the character of Balzac's novels ! The fact that 
he was born in Tours in 1799 results in the in- 
evitable and inevitably expert paragraphs about 
Gallic blood, and the physical exuberance of the 
Touraine surroundings of his youth, and the 
post-revolutionary tendency to disillusion and 
analysis. And so with Balzac's education, his 
removal to Paris in the Restoration period, his 
ventures in business and his affairs of love, his 
admiration for Shakespeare and for Fenimore 
Cooper; his mingled Romanticism and Real- 
ism ; his Titanism and his childishness ; his stu- 
pendous outline for the Human Comedy; and 

[22] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

his scarcely less astounding actual achievement. 
All this is discussed by his biographers with the 
professional dexterity of critics trained intellec- 
tually in the Latin traditions and instinctively 
aware of the claims of race, biographers familiar 
with every page of French history, and pro- 
foundly interested, like their readers, in every 
aspect of French life. Alas, we may say, in 
despairing admiration of such workmanship, 
" they order these things better in France." 
And they do ; but racial unity, and long lines of 
national literary tradition, make these things 
easier to order than they are with us. The 
intellectual distinction of American critical 
biographies like Lounsbury's Cooper or Wood- 
berry's Hawthorne is all the more notable be- 
cause we possess such a slender body of truly 
critical doctrine native to our own soil ; because 
our national literary tradition as to available 
material and methods is hardly formed; because 
the very word "American" has a less precise 
connotation than the word "New Zealander." 
Let us suppose, for instance, that like Pro- 
fessor Woodberry a few years ago, we were 
asked to furnish a critical study of Hawthorne. 
The author of "The Scarlet Letter is one of the 

[23] 



The American Mind 

most justly famous of American writers. But 
precisely what national traits are to be discov- 
ered in this eminent fellow-countryman of ours? 
We turn, like loyal disciplesofTaineand Sainte- 
Beuve, to his ancestral stock. We find that it 
is English as far back as it can be traced; as 
purely English as the ancestry of Dickens or 
Thackeray, and more purely English than the 
ancestry of Browning or Burke or His Majesty 
George the Fifth. Was Hawthorne, then, sim- 
ply an Englishman living in America ? He 
himself did not think so, — as his English Note- 
Books abundantly prove. But just what subtle 
racial differentiation had been at work, since 
William Hawthorne migrated to Massachusetts 
with Winthrop in 1630? Here we face, unless 
I am mistaken, that troublesome but fascinat- 
ing question of Physical Geography. Climate, 
soil, food, occupation, reHgious or moral pre- 
occupation, social environment, Salem witch- 
craft and Salem seafaring had all laid their in- 
visible hands upon the physical and intellectual 
endowment of the ehild born in 1804. Does 
this make Nathaniel Hawthorne merely an 
" Englishman with a difference," as Mr. Kip- 
ling, born in India, is an " Englishman with a 

[24] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

dIfFerence " ? Hawthorne would have smiled, 
or, more probably, he would have sworn, at such 
a question. He considered himself an Ameri- 
can Democrat; in fact a contra mundum Demo- 
crat, for good or for ill. Is it, then, a political 
theory, first put into full operation in this 
country a scant generation before Hawthorne*s 
birth, which made him un-English ? We must 
walk warily here. Our Canadian neighbors of 
English stock have much the same climate, soil, 
occupations, and preoccupations as the inhabit- 
ants of the northern territory of the United 
States. They have much the same courts, 
churches, and legislatures. They read the same 
books and magazines. They even prefer base- 
ball to cricket. They are loyal adherents of a 
monarchy, but they are precisely as free, as self- 
governing, and — in the social sense of the 
word — as " democratic " — in spite of the ab- 
sence of a republican form of government — as 
the citizens of that " land of the free and home 
of the brave " which lies to the south of them. 
Yet Canadian literature, one may venture to 
affirm, has remained to this hour a " colonial " 
literature, or, if one prefers the phrase, a litera- 
ture of " Greater Britain." Was Hawthorne 

[25] 



The American Mind 

possibly right in his instinct that politics did 
make a difference, and that in writing 'I'he 
Marble Faun, — the scene of which is laid in 
Rome, — or ne House of the Seven Gables^ — 
which is a story of Salem, — he was consist- 
ently engaged in producing, not "colonial** 
or "Greater-British" but distinctly American 
literature ? We need not answer this ques- 
tion prematurely, if we wish to reserve our judg- 
ment, but it is assuredly one of the questions 
which the biographers and critics of our men 
of letters must ultimately face and answer. 

Furthermore, the student of literature pro- 
duced in the United States of America must 
face other questions almost as complicated as 
this of race. In fact, when wechoose Hawthorne 
as a typical case in which to observe the Ameri- 
can refashioning of the English temper into 
something not English, we are selecting a very 
simple problem compared with the complex- 
ities which have resulted from the mingling of 
various European stocks upon American soil. 
But take, for the moment, the mere obvious 
matter of expanse of territory. We are obliged 
to reckon, not with a compact province such as 
those in which many Old World literatures 

[26] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

have been produced, but with what our grand- 
fathers considered a " boundless continent." 
This vast national domain was long ago " or- 
ganized " for political purposes : but so far as 
literature is concerned it remains unorganized 
to-day. We have, as has been constantly ob- 
served, no literary capital, like London or Paris, 
to serve as the seat of centralized authority ; 
no code of literary procedure and conduct ; no 
"lawgivers of Parnassus'*; no supreme court of 
letters, whose judgments are recognized and 
obeyed. American public opinion asserts itself 
with singular unanimity and promptness in the 
field of politics. In literary matters we remain 
in the stage of anarchic individualism, liable to 
be stampeded from time to time by mob-ex- 
citement over a popular novel or moralistic 
tract, and then disintegrating, as before, into 
an incoherent mass of individually intelligent 
readers. 

The reader who has some personal acquaint- 
ance with the variations of type in different sec- 
tions of this immense territory of ours finds his 
curiosity constantly stimulated by the presence 
of sectional and local characteristics. There are 
sharply cut provincial peculiarities, of course, 

[27] 



The American Mind 

in Great Britain and in Germany, in Italy and 
Spain, and in all of the countries a correspond- 
ing '^ regional " literature has been developed. 
Our provincial variations of accent and vocabu- 
lary, in passing from North to South or East 
to West, are less striking, on the whole, than 
the dialectical differences found in the various 
English counties. But our general uniformity 
of grammar and the comparatively slight vari- 
ations in spoken accent cover an extraordinary 
variety of local and sectional modes of thinking 
and feeling. The reader of American short 
stories and lyrics must constantly ask himself: 
Is this truth to local type consistent with the 
main trend of American production ? Is this 
merely a bit of Virginia or Texas or California, 
or does it, while remaining no less Southern or 
Western in its local coloring, suggest also the 
ampler light, the wide generous air of the United 
States of America ? 

The observer of this relationship between 
local and national types will find some Ameri- 
can communities where all the speech or habit- 
ual thought is of the future. Foreigners usually 
consider such communities the most typically 
"American," as doubtless they are ; but there 

[ 28 ] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

are other sections, still more faithfully exploited 
by local writers, where the mood is wistful and 
habitually regards the past. America, too, like 
the Old World, — and in New England more 
than elsewhere, — has her note of decadence, 
of disillusion, of autumnal brightness and trans- 
iency. Some sections of the country, and not- 
ably the slave-holding states in the forty years 
preceding the Civil War, have suffered wide- 
spread intellectual blight. The best talent of 
the South, for a generation, went into politics, ^ 
in the passionately loyal endeavor to prop up 
a doomed economic and social system ; and the 
loss to the intellectual life of the country can- 
not be reckoned. Over vast sections of our 
prosperous and intelligent people of the Miss- 
issippi Basin to-day the very genius of com- 
monplaceness seems to hover. Take the great 
State of Iowa, with its well-to-do and homo- 
geneous population, its fortunate absence of 
perplexing city-problems, its general air of pro- 
sperity and content. It is a typical state of the 
most typically American portion of the country ; 
but it breeds no books. Yet in Indiana, another 
state of the same general conditions as to pop- 
ulation and prosperity, and only one generation 

[29] 



The American Mind 

further removed than Iowa from primitive pio- 
neer conditions, books are produced at a rate 
which provokes a universal American smile. 
I do not affirm that the literary critic is bound 
to answer all such local puzzles as this. But he 
is bound at least to reflect upon them, and to 
demand of every local literary product through- 
out this varied expanse of states : Is the root of 
the " All-American " plant growing here, or is 
it not? 

Furthermore, the critic must pursue this in- 
vestigation of national traits in our writing, not 
only over a wide and variegated territory, but 
through a very considerable sweep of time. 
American literature is often described as " cal- 
low," as the revelation of " national inexperi- 
ence," and in other similar terms. It is true that 
we had no professional men of letters before 
Irving and that the blossoming time of the not- 
able New England group of writers did not 
come until nearly the middle of the nineteenth 
century. But we have had time enough, after 
all, to show what we wish to be and what we are. 
There have been European books about 
America ever since the days of Columbus; it is 
three hundred years since the first books were 

[ 30 ] 4 



Race, Nation, and Book 

written in America. Modern English prose, 
the language of journalism, of science, of social 
intercourse, came into being only in the early 
eighteenth century, in the age of Queen Anne. 
But Cotton Mather's Magnalia, a vast book 
deahng with the past history of New England, 
was printed in 1702, only a year later than De- 
foe's 'True-Born Englishman. For more than two 
centuries the development of English speech 
and English writing on this side of the Atlantic 
has kept measurable pace — now slower, now 
swifter — withthespeechofthemothercountry. 
When we recall the scanty term of years within 
which was produced the literature of the age of 
Elizabeth, it seems like special pleading to in- 
sist that America has not yet had time to learn 
or recite her bookish lessons. 

This is not saying that we have had a con- 
tinuous or adequate development, either of 
the intellectual life, or of literary expression. 
There are certain periods of strong intellectual 
movement, of heightened emotion, alike in the 
colonial epoch and since the adoption of our 
present form of government, in which it is nat- 
ural to search for revelations of those qualities 
which we now feel to be essential to our national 

[31 ] 



The American Mind 

character. Certain epochs of our history, in 
other words, have been peculiarly "American," 
and have furnished the most ideal expression 
of national tendencies. 

If asked to select the three periods of our 
history which in this sense have been most sig- 
nificant, most of us, I imagine, would choose 
the first vigorous epoch of New England Puri- 
tanism, say from 1630 to 1676 ; then, the epoch 
of the great Virginians, say from 1766 to 1789 ; 
and finally the epoch of distinctly national feel- 
ing, in which New England and the West were 
leaders, between 1830 and 1865. Those three 
generations have been the most notable in the 
three hundred years since the permanent settle- 
ments began. Each of them has revealed, in a 
noble fashion, the political, ethical, and emo- 
tional traits of our people ; and although the 
first two of the three periods concerned them- 
selves but little with literary expression of the 
deep-lying characteristics of our stock, the 
expression is not lacking. Thomas Hooker's 
sermon on the "Foundation of Political Au- 
thority," John Winthrop's grave advice on the 
" Nature of Liberty," Jefferson's " Declara- 
tion," Webster's "Reply to Hayne," Lincoln's 



Race, Nation, and Book 

"Inaugurals," are all fundamentally American. 
They are political in their immediate purpose, 
but, like the speeches of Edmund Burke, they 
are no less literature because they are concerned 
with the common needs and the common des- 
tiny. Hooker and Winthrop wrote before our 
formal national existence began ; Jefferson, at 
the hour of the nation's birth ; and Lincoln, in 
the day of its sharpest trial. Yet, though separ- 
ated from one another by long intervals of 
time, the representative figures of the three 
epochs, English in blood and American in feel- 
ing, are not so unlike as one might think. A 
thorough grasp of our literature thus requires 
— and in scarcely less a degree than the mastery 
of one of the literatures of Europe — a survey 
of a long period, the search below the baffling 
or contradictory surface of national experience 
for the main drift of that experience, and the 
selection of the writers, of one generation after 
another, who have given the most fit and per- 
manent and personalized expression to the un- 
derlying forces of the national life. 

There is another preliminary word which 
needs no less to be said. It concerns the ques- 
tion of international influences upon national 



The American Mind 

literature. Our own generation has been taught 
by many events that no race or country can 
any longer live " to itself." Internationalism 
is in the very atmosphere: and not merely as 
regards politics in the narrowed sense, but with 
reference to questions of economics, sociology, 
art, and letters. The period of international iso- 
lation of the United States, we are rather too 
fond of saying, closed with the Spanish-Amer- 
ican War. It would be nearer the truth to say 
that so far as the things of the mind and the 
spirit are concerned, there has never been any 
absolute isolation. The Middle West, from 
the days of Jackson to Lincoln, that raw West 
described by Dickens and Mrs. Trollope, comes 
nearer isolation than any other place or time. 
The period of the most eloquent assertions of 
American independence in artistic and Hterary 
matters was the epoch of New England Trans- 
cendentalism, which was itself singularly cos- 
mopolitan in its Hterary appetites. The letters 
and journals of Emerson, Whitman, and Tho- 
reau show the strong European meat on which 
these men fed, just before their robust declar- 
ations of our self-sufficiency. But there is no 
real self-sufficiency, and Emerson and Whit- 

[34] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

man themselves, in other moods, have written 
most suggestive passages upon our European 
inheritances and affiliations. 

The fortunes of the early New England colo- 
nies, in fact, were followed by Protestant Eu- 
rope with the keen solicitude and affection of 
kinsmen. Oliver Cromwell signs his letter 
to John Cotton in 1651, "Your affectionate 
friend to serve you." The settlements were re- 
garded as outposts of European ideas. Their 
Calvinism, so cheaply derided and so super- 
ficially understood, even to-day, was the intel- 
lectual platform of that portion of Europe 
which was mentally and morally awake to the 
vast issues involved in individual respon- 
sibility and self-government. Contemporary 
European democracy is hardly yet aware that 
Calvin's Institutes is one of its great charters. 
Continental Protestantism of the seventeenth 
century, like the militant Republicanism of 
the English Commonwealth, thus perused with 
fraternal interest the letters from Massachu- 
setts Bay. And if Europe watched America 
in those days, it was no less true that America 
was watching Europe. Towards the end of 
the century, Cotton Mather, "prostrate in the / 

[35] 



The American Mind 

dust " before the Lord, as his newly published 
Diary tells us, is wrestling " on the behalf of 
whole nations." He receives a " strong Persua- 
sion that very overturning Dispensations of 
Heaven will quickly befal the French Em- 
pire"; he "lifts up his Cries for a mighty and 
speedy Revolution " there. " I spread before the 
Lord the Condition of His Church abroad . . . 
especially in Great Britain and in France. And I 
prayed that the poor Vaudois may not be ruined 
by the Peace now made between France and 
Savoy. I prayed likewise for further Mor- 
tifications upon the Turkish Empire." Here 
surely was one colonial who was trying, in Cecil 
Rhodes's words, to "think continentally!" 

Furthermore, the leaders of those early col- 
onies were in large measure university men, 
disciplined in the classics, fit representatives of 
European culture. It has been reckoned that 
between the years 1630 and 1690 there were 
in New England as many graduates of Cam- 
bridge and Oxford as could be found in any 
population of similar size in the mother coun- 
try. At one time during those years there was 
in Massachusetts and Connecticut alone a 
Cambridge graduate for every two hundred and 

[36 ] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

fifty Inhabitants. Like the exiled Greeks in 
Matthew Arnold's poem, they "undid their 
corded bales'' — of learning, it is true, rather 
than of merchandise — upon these strange and 
inhospitable shores : and the traditions of 
Greek and Hebrew and Latin scholarship were 
maintained with no loss of continuity. To the 
lover of letters there will always be something 
fine in the thought of that narrow seaboard 
fringe of faith in the classics, widening slowly 
as the wilderness gave way, making its invis- 
ible road up the rivers, across the mountains, 
into the great interior basin, and only after the 
Civil War finding an enduring home in the 
magnificent state universities of the West. 
Lovers of Greek and Roman literature may 
perhaps always feel themselves pilgrims and 
exiles in this vast industrial democracy of ours, 
but they have at least secured for us, and that 
from the very first day of the colonies, some 
of the best fruitage of internationalism. For 
that matter, what was, and is, that one Book 
— to the eyes of the Protestant seventeenth 
century infallible and inexpressively sacred — 
but the most potent and universal commerce 
of ideas and spirit, passing from the Orient, 

[37] 



The American Mind 

through Greek and Roman civilization, into 
the mind and heart of Western Europe and 
America ? 

*« Oh, East is East, and West is West, 
And never the twain shall meet,** 

declares a confident poet of to-day. But East 
and West met long ago in the matchless phrases 
translated from Hebrew and Greek and Latin 
into the English Bible ; and the heart of the 
East there answers to the heart of the West as 
in water face answereth to face. That the colo- 
nizing Englishmen of the seventeenth century 
were Hebrews in spiritual culture, and heirs of 
Greece and Rome without ceasing to be Anglo- 
Saxon in blood, is one of the marvels of the his- 
tory of civilization, and it is one of the basal 
facts in the intellectual life of the United States 
of to-day. 

Yet that life, as I have already hinted, is not 
so simple in its terms as it might be if we had to 
reckon merely with the men of a single stock, 
albeit with imaginations quickened by contact 
with an Oriental religion, and minds disciplined, 
directly or indirectly, by the methods and the 
literatures which the Revival of Learning im- 
posed upon modern Europe. American formal 

[38] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

culture Is, and has been, from the beginning, pre- 
dominantly English. Yet it has been colored by 
the influences of other strains of race, and by 
alien intellectual traditions. Such international 
influences as have reached us through German 
and Scandinavian, Celtic and Italian, Russian 
and Jewish immigration, are well marked in 
certain localities, although their traces may be 
diflicult to follow in the main trend of American 
writing. Thepresenceof Negro, Irishman, Jew, 
and German, has affected our popular humor 
and satire, and is everywhere to be marked in 
the vocabulary and tone of our newspapers. 
The cosmopolitan character of the population 
of such cities as New York and Chicago strikes 
every foreign observer. Each one of the mani- 
fold races now transplanted here and in process 
of Americanization has for a while its own news- 
papers and churches and social life carried on in 
a foreign dialect. But this stage of evolution 
passes swiftly. The assimilative forcesof Amer- 
ican schools, industry, commerce, politics, are 
too strong for the foreign immigrant to resist. 
The Italian or Greek fruit pedler soon prefers 
to talk English, and his children can be made 
to talk nothing else. This extraordinary amal- 

[39 ] 



The American Mind 

gamating power of English culture explains, 
no doubt, why German and Scandinavian im- 
migration — to take examples from two of the 
most intelligent and educated races that have 
contributed to the up-building of the country 
— have left so little trace, as yet, upon our 
more permanent literature. 

But blood will have its say sooner or later. 
No one knows how profoundly the strong 
mentality of the Jew, already evident enough 
in the fields of manufacturing and finance, will 
mould the intellectual life of the United States. 
The mere presence, to say nothing of the rapid 
absorption, of these millions upon millions of 
aliens, as the children of the Puritans regard 
them, is a constant evidence of the subtle ways 
in which internationalism is playing its part in 
the fashioning of the American temper. The 
moulding hand of the German university has 
been laid upon our higher institutions of learn- 
ing for seventy years, although no one can 
demonstrate in set terms whether the influence 
of Goethe, read now by three generations of 
American scholars and studied by millions of 
youth in the schools, has left any real mark upon 
our literature. Abraham Lincoln, in his store- 

[40] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

keeping days, used to sit under a tree outside 
the grocery store of Lincoln and Berry, read- 
ing Voltaire. One would like to think that he 
then and there assimilated something of the in- 
comparable lucidity of style of the great French- 
man. But Voltaire's influence upon Lincoln's 
style cannot be proved, any more than Rous- 
seau's direct influence upon Jefferson. Tolstoi 
and Ibsen have, indeed, left unmistakable traces 
upon American imaginative writing during the 
last quarter of a century. Frank Norris was in- 
debted to Zola for the scheme of that uncom- 
pleted trilogy, the prose epic of the Wheat ; and 
Owen Wister has revealed a not uncommon ex- 
perience of our younger writing men in confess- 
ing that the impulse toward writing his Western 
stories came to him after reading the delightful 
pages of a French romancer. But all this tells 
us merely what we knew well enough before : 
that from colonial days to the present hour the 
Atlantic has been no insuperable barrier be- 
tween the thought of Europe and the mind of 
America ; that no one race bears aloft all the 
torches of intellectual progress ; and that a really 
vital writer of any country finds a home in the 
spiritual life of every other country, even though 

[41 ] 



The American Mind 

it may be difficult to find his name in the local 
directory. 

Finally, we must bear in mind that purely 
literary evidence as to the existence of certain 
national traits needs corroboration from many 
non-literary sources. If it is dangerous to judge 
modern Japan by the characteristics of a piece 
of pottery, it is only less misleading to select 
half a dozen excellent New England writers of 
fifty years ago as sole witnesses to the qualities 
of contemporary America. We must broaden 
the range of evidence. The historians of Amer- 
ican literature must ultimately reckon with all 
those sources of mental and emotional quick- 
ening which have yielded to our pioneer peo- 
ple a substitute for purely literary pleasures : 
they must do justice to the immense mass of 
letters, diaries, sermons, editorials, speeches, 
which have served as the grammar and phrase- 
book of national feeling. A history of our lit- 
erature must be flexible enough, as I have said 
elsewhere, to include "the social and economic 
and geographical background of American life; 
the zest of the explorer, the humor of the pio- 
neer; the passion of old political battles; the 
yearning after spiritual truth and social read- 

[42] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

justment ; the baffled quest of beauty. Such a 
history must be broad enough for the Federal- 
ist and for Webster's oratory, for Beecher*s ser- 
mons and Greeley's editorials, and the Lin- 
coln-Douglas debates. It must picture thedaily 
existence of our citizens from the beginning ; 
their working ideas, their phrases and shibbo- 
leths and all their idols of the forum and the 
cave. It should portray the misspelled ideals 
of a profoundly idealistic people who have been 
usually immersed in material things." 

Our most characteristic American writing, 
as must be pointed out again and again, is not 
the self-conscious literary performance of a Poe 
or a Hawthorne. It is civic writing ; a citizen 
literature, produced, like the Federalist^ and 
Garrison's editorials and Grant's 7kf^;;/^/r J, with- 
out any stylistic consciousness whatever ; a sort 
of writing which has been incidental to the ac- 
complishment of some political, social, or moral 
purpose, and which scarcely regards itself as 
literature at all. The supreme example of it is 
the " Gettysburg Address." Homeliness, sim- 
plicity, directness, preoccupation with moral 
issues, have here been but the instrument of 
beauty ; phrase and thought and feeling have a 

[43] 



The American Mind 

noble fitness to the national theme. " Nothing 
of Europe here/' we may instinctively exclaim, 
and yet the profounder lesson of this citizen 
literature of ours is in the universality of the 
fundamental questions which our literature pre- 
sents. The " Gettysburg Address " would not 
to-day have a secure fame in Europe if it spoke 
nothing to the ear and the heart of Europe. 
And this brings us back to our main theme. 
Lincoln, like Franklin, like many another 
lesser master of our citizen literature, is a typ- 
ical American. In the writing produced by such 
men, there cannot but be a revelation of Amer- 
ican characteristics. We are now to attempt an 
analysis of these national traits, as they have 
been expressed by our representative writers. 
Simple as the problem seems, when thus 
stated, its adequate performance calls for a 
constant sensitiveness to the conditions preva- 
lent, during a long period, in English and Con- 
tinental society and literature. The most rudi- 
mentary biographical sketch of such eminent 
contemporary American authors as Mr. Henry 
James and Mr. Howells shows that Europe 
is an essential factor in the intellectual life and 
in the artistic procedure of these writers. Yet 

[44] 



Race, Nation, and Book 

in their racial and national relationships they 
are indubitably American. In their local vari- 
ations from type they demand from the critic 
an understanding of the culture of the Ohio 
Valley, and of Boston and New York. The 
analysis of the mingled racial, psychological, 
social, and professional traits in these masters of 
contemporary American fiction presents to the 
critic a problem as fascinating as, and I think 
more complex than, a corresponding study of 
Meredith or Hardy, of Daudet or D'Annun- 
zio. In the three hundred years that have 
elapsed since Englishmen who were trained 
under Queen Elizabeth settled at Jamestown, 
Virginia, we have bred upon this soil many a 
master of speech. They have been men of 
varied gifts : now of clear intelligence, now of 
commanding power; men of rugged simplicity 
and of tantalizing subtlety; poets, novelists, 
orators, essayists, and publicists, who have in- 
terpreted the soul of America to the mind of 
the world. Our task is to exhibit the essential 
Americanism of these spokesmen of ours, to 
point out the traits which make them most 
truly representative of the instincts of the 
tongue-tied millions who work and plan and 

[45] 



The American Mind 

pass from sight without the gift and art of 
utterance ; to find, in short, among the books 
which are recognized as constituting our Amer- 
ican Hterature, some vital and illuminating il- 
lustrations of our national characteristics. For 
a truly " American " book — like an American 
national game, or an American city — is that 
which reveals, consciously or unconsciously, 
the American mind. 



II 

The American Mind 

The origin of the phrase, "the American 
mind/' was political. Shortly after the middle 
of the eighteenth century, there began to be a 
distinctly American way of regarding the de- 
batable question of British Imperial control. 
During the period of the Stamp Act agitation 
our colonial-bred politicians and statesmen 
made the discovery that there was a mode of 
thinking and feeling which was native — or 
had by that time become a second nature — 
to all the colonists. Jefferson, for example, 
employs those resonant and useful words " the 
American mind " to indicate that throughout 
the American colonies an essential unity of 
opinion had been developed as regards the 
chief political question of the day. 

It is one of the most striking characteristics 
of the present United States that this instinct of 
political unity should have endured, triumphing 

[47 ] 



The American Mind 

over every temporary motive of division. The 
inhabitants of the United States belong to a 
single political type. There is scarcely a news- 
stand in any country of Continental Europe 
where one may not purchase a newspaper 
openly or secretly opposed to the government, 
— not merely attacking an unpopular admin- 
istration or minister or ruler, — but desiring 
and plotting the overthrow of the entire polit- 
ical system of the country. It is very difficult 
to find such a newspaper anywhere in the 
United States. I myself have never seen one. 
The opening sentence of President Butler's 
admirable little book, '^he American as He 
Is, originally delivered as lectures before the 
University of Copenhagen, runs as follows : 

"The most impressive fact in American life 
is the substantial unity of view in regard to 
the fundamental questions of government and 
of conduct among a population so large, dis- 
tributed over an area so wide, recruited from 
sources so many and so diverse, living under 
conditions so widely different." 

But the American type of mind is evi- 
dent in many other fields than that of politics. 
The stimulating book from which I have just 

[48 ] 



The American Mind 

quoted, attempts in its closing paragraph, after 
touching upon the more salient features of our 
national activity, to define the typical Amer- 
ican in these words : — 

" The typical American is he who, whether 
rich or poor, whether dwelling in the North, 
South, East, or West, whether scholar, pro- 
fessional man, merchant, manufacturer, farmer, 
or skilled worker for wages, lives the life of a 
good citizen and good neighbor ; who believes 
loyally and with all his heart in his country's 
institutions, and in the underlying principles 
on which these institutions are built ; who 
directs both his private and his public life by 
sound principles ; who cherishes high ideals ; 
and who aims to train his children for a use- 
ful life and for their country's service." 

This modest and sensible statement indicates 
the existence of a national point of view. We 
have developed in the course of time, as a result 
of certain racial inheritances and historic expe- 
riences, a national "temper" or "ethos"; a 
more or less settled way of considering intel- 
lectual, moral, and social problems; in short, a 
peculiarly national attitude toward the uni- 
versal human questions. 

[49] 



The American Mind 

£/li^ ^ narrower sense, "the American mind" 
may mean the characteristics of the American in- 
telligence, as it has been studied by Mr. Bryce, 
De Tocqueville, and other trained observers 
of our methods of thinking. It may mean Jhe 
specific achievements of the American intelli- 
gence in fields like science and scholarship and 
history. 'In all these particular departments of 
intellectual activity the methods and the results 
of American workers have recently received ex- 
pert and by no means uniformly favorable as- 
sessment from investigators upon both sides of 
the Atlantic. But the observer of literary pro- 
cesses and productions must necessarily take a 
somewhat broader survey of national tenden- 
cies. He must study what Nathaniel Haw- 
thorne, with the instinct of a romance writer, 
preferred to call the " heart" as distinguished 
from the mere intellect. He must watch the 
moral and social and imaginative impulses of 
the individual ; the desire for beauty ; the hunger 
for self-expression ; the conscious as well as the 
unconscious revelation of personality; and he 
must bring all this into relation — if he can, 
and knowing that the finer secrets are sure to 
elude him! — with the age-long impulses of the 

[ 50] 



The American Mind 

race and with the mysterious tides of feeling 
that flood or ebb with the changing fortunes of 
the nation. 

One way to begin to understand the typical 
American is to take a look at him in Europe. 
It does not require a professional beggar or 
a licensed guide to identify him. Not that the 
American in Europe need recall in any partic- 
ular the familiar pictorial caricature of " Uncle 
Sam." He need not bear any outward resem- 
blances to such stage types as that presented in 
" The Man From Home.** He need not even 
suggest, by peculiarities of speech or manner, 
that he has escaped from the pages of those 
novels of international observation in which 
Mr. James and Mr. Howells long ago at- 
tained an unmatched artistry. Our " American 
Abroad," at the present hour, may be studied 
without the aid of any literary recollections 
whatever. There he is, with his wife and daugh- 
ters, and one may stare at him with all the 
frankness of a compatriot. He is obviously 
well-to-do, — else he would not be there at 
all, — and the wife and daughters seem very 
well-to-do indeed. He is kindly ; considerate 
— sometimes effusively considerate — of his 

[51 ] 



The American Mind 

fellow travellers ; patient with the ladies of his 
family, who in turn are noticeably patient with 
him. He is genial — very willing to talk with 
polyglot head waiters and chauffeurs ; in fact 
the wife and daughters are also practised con- 
versationalists, although their most loyal ad- 
mirers must admit that their voices are a trifle 
sharp or flat. These ladies are more widely 
read than "papa." He has not had much lei- 
sure for Ruskin and Symonds and Ferrero. 
His lack of historical training limits his curi- 
osity concerning certain phases of his European 
surroundings ; but he uses his eyes well upon 
such general objects as trains, hotel-service, 
and EngHshmen. In spite of his habitual gen- 
iality, he is rather critical of foreign ways, 
although this is partly due to his lack of ac- 
quaintance with them. Intellectually, he is 
really more modest and self-distrustful than 
his conversation or perhaps his general bearing 
would imply ; in fact, his wife and daughters, 
emboldened very likely by the training of their 
women's clubs, have a more commendable 
daring In assaulting new intellectual positions. 
Yet the American does not lack quickness, 
either of wits or emotion. His humor and sen- 



The American Mind 

timent make him an entertaining companion. 
Even when his spirits run low, his patriotism 
is sure to mount in proportion, and he can al- 
ways tell you with enthusiasm in just how many 
days he expects to be back again in what he 
calls " God's country.'* 

This, or something like this, is the" Ameri- 
can " whom the European regards with curios- 
ity, contempt, admiration, or envy, as the case 
may be, but who is incontestably modifying 
Western Europe, even if he is not, as many 
journalists and globe-trotters are fond of assert- 
ing, "Americanizing" the world. Interesting 
as it is to glance at him against that European 
background which adds picturesqueness to his 
qualities, the " Man from Home " is still more 
interesting in his native habitat. There he has 
been visited by hundreds of curious and observ- 
ant foreigners, who have left on record a whole 
literature of bewildered and bewildering, irritat- 
ing and flattering and amusing testimony con- 
cerning the Americans. Settlers like Crevecoeur 
in the glowing dawn of the Republic, poets like 
Tom Moore, novelists like Charles Dickens, — 
other novelists like Mr. Arnold Bennett, — 
professional travellers like Captain Basil Hall, 

[ 53] 



The American Mind 

students of contemporary sociology like Paul 
Bourget and Mr. H. G. Wells, French jour- 
nalists, German professors, Italian admirers of 
Colonel Roosevelt, political theorists like De 
Tocqueville, profound and friendly observers 
like Mr. Bryce, have had, and will continue to 
have, their say. 

The reader who tries to take all this testi- 
mony at its face value, and to reconcile its con- 
tradictions, will be a candidate for the insane 
asylum. Yet the testimony is too amusing to 
be neglected and some of it is far too important 
to be ignored. Mr. John Graham Brooks, after 
long familiarity with these foreign opinions of 
America, has gathered some of the most repre- 
sentative of them into a delightful and stimu- 
lating volume entitled As Others See Us, There 
one may find examples of what the foreigner 
has seen, or imagined he has seen, during his 
sojourn in America, and what he has said 
about it afterwards. Mr. Brooks is too char- 
itable to our visitors to quote the most fan- 
tastic and highly colored of their observations ; 
but what remains is sufficiently bizarre, 

/The real service of such a volume is to train 
us in discounting the remarks made about us in 

[54] 



The American Mind 

a particular period like the eighteen-thirties, or 
from observations made in a special place, like 
Newport, or under special circumstances, like a 
Bishop's private car. It helps us to make allow- 
ances for the inevitable angle of nationality, the 
equally inevitable personal equation. A recent 
ambitious book on America, by a Washington 
journalist of long residence here, although of 
foreign birth, declares that " the chief trait of 
the American people is the love of gain and the 
desire of wealth acquired through commerce." 
That is the opinion of an expert observer, who 
has had extraordinary chances for seeing pre- 
cisely what he has seen. I think it, notwith- 
standing, a preposterous opinion, fully as pre- 
posterous as Professor Muensterberg's notion 
that America has latterly grown m.ore monarch- 
ical in its tendencies, — but I must remember 
that, in my own case, as in that of the journalist 
under consideration, there are allowances to be 
made for race, and training, and natural idiosyn- 
cracy of vision. 

The native American, it may be well to re- 
member, is something of an observer himself. 
If his observations upon the characteristics 
of his countrymen are less piquant than the 

C 55] 



The American Mind 

foreigner's, it Is chiefly because the American 
writes, upon the whole, less incisively than he 
talks. But incisive native writing about Ameri- 
can traits is not lacking. If a missionary, say in 
South Africa, has read the New York Nation 
every week for the past forty years, he has had 
an extraordinary " moving picture" of Amer- 
ican tendencies, as interpreted by indepen- 
dent, trenchant, and high-minded criticism. 
That a file of the Nation will convey precisely 
the same impression of American tendencies 
as a file of the Sun^ for instance, or the Boston 
Evening 'transcripts is not to be affirmed. The 
humor of the London Punch and the New 
York Life does not differ more radically than 
the aspects of American civilization as viewed 
by two rival journals in Newspaper Row. The 
complexity of the material now collected and 
presented in daily journalism is so great that 
adequate editorial interpretation is obviously 
impossible. All the more insistently does this 
heterogeneous picture of American life demand 
the impartial interpretation of the historian, the 
imaginative transcription of the novelist. Hu- 
morist and moralist, preacher and mob orator 
and social essayist, shop-talk and talk over the 

[56] 



The American Mind 

tea-cup or over the pipe, and the far more Il- 
luminating instruction of events, are fashioning 
day by day the infinitely delicate processes of 
our national self-assessment. Scholars like Mr. 
Henry Adams or Mr. James Ford Rhodes will 
explain to us American life as it was during the 
administrations of Jefferson or in theeighteen- 
fifties. Professor Turner will expound the sig- 
nificance of the frontier in American history. 
Mr. Henry James will portray with unrivalled 
psychological insight the Europeanized Amer- 
ican of the eighteen-seventies and eighties. Lit- 
erary critics like Professor Wendell or Professor 
Trent will deduce from our literature itself evi- 
dence concerning this or that national quality; 
and all this mass of American expert testimony, 
itself a result and a proof of national self-aware- 
ness and self-respect, must be put into the scales 
to balance, to confirm, or to outweigh the re- 
ports furnished by foreigners. 

I do not pretend to be able, like an expert 
accountant, to draw up a balance-sheet of na- 
tional qualities, to credit or debit the Amer- 
ican character with this or that precise quantity 
of excellence or defect. But having turned the 
pages of many books about the United States, 

[ 57 ] 



The American Mind 

and listened to many conversations about its 
inhabitants in many states of the Union, I ven- 
ture to collect a brief list of the qualities which 
have been assigned to us, together with a few, 
but not, I trust, too many, of our admitted 
national defects. 

Like that excellent German who wrote the 
History of the English Drama in six volumes, 
I begin with Physical Geography. The differ- 
entiation of the physical characteristics of our 
branch of the English race is admittedly due, 
in part, to climate. In spite of the immense 
range of climatic variations as one passes from 
New England to New Orleans, from the Miss- 
issippi Valley to the high plains of the Far 
West, or from the rainy Oregon belt south- 
ward to San Diego, the settlers of English 
stock find a prevalent atmospheric condition, 
as a result of which they begin, in a generation 
or two, to change in physique. They grow 
thinner and more nervous, they "lean for- 
ward," as has been admirably said of them, 
while the Englishman " leans back " ; they are 
less heavy and less steady; their voices are 
higher, sharper; their athletes get more easily 
" on edge"; they respond, in short, to an exces- 

[58] 



The American Mind 

sively stimulating climate. An old-fashioned 
sea-captain put it all into a sentence when he 
said that he could drink a bottle of wine with 
his dinner in Liverpool and only a half a bottle 
in New York. Explain the cause as we may, 
the fact seems to be that the body of John 
Bull changes, in the United States, into the 
body of Uncle Sam. 

There are mental differences no less pro- 
nounced. No adjective has been more fre- 
quently applied to the Anglo-Saxon than the 
word " dull." The American mind has been 
accused of ignorance, superficiality, levity, com- 
monplaceness, and dozens of other defects, but 
"dulness" is not one of them. "Smartness,** 
rather, is the preferred epithet of derogation ; 
or, to rise a little in the scale of valuation, it is 
the word " cleverness,** used with that lurking 
contempt for cleverness which is truly English 
and which long survived in the dialect of New 
England, where the village ne*er-do-well or 
Jack-of-all-trades used to be pronounced a 
" clever ** fellow. The variety of employments 
to which the American pioneers were obliged 
to betake themselves has done something, no 
doubt, to produce a national versatility, a quick 

[ 59 ] 



The American Mind 

assimilation of new methods and notions, a 
ready adaptability to novel emergencies. An 
invaluable pioneer trait is curiosity ; the settler 
in a new country, like Moses in the wilderness 
of Arabia, must " turn aside to see " ; he must 
look into things, learn to read signs, — or else 
the Indians or frost or freshet will soon put an 
end to his pioneering. That curiosity concern- 
ing strangers which so much irritated Dickens 
and Mrs. Trollope was natural to the children 
of Western emigrants to whom the difference 
between Sioux and Pawnee had once meant 
life or death. "What 's your business, stranger, 
in these parts ? " was an instinctive, because it 
had once been a vital, question. That it degen- 
erates into mere inquisitiveness is true enough ; 
just as the "acuteness," the "awareness," es- 
sential to the existence of one generation be- 
comes only " cuteness," the typical tin-pedler's 
habit of mind, in the generation following. 

American inexperience, the national rawness 
and unsophistication which has impress&d so 
many observers, has likewise its double sig- 
nificance when viewed historically. We have 
exhibited, no doubt, the amateurishness and 
recklessness which spring from relative isola- 

[60] 



The American Mind 

tion, from ignorance as to how they manage 
elsewhere this particular sort of thing, — the 
conservation of forests, let us say, or the gov- 
ernment of colonial dependencies. National 
smugness and conceit, the impatience crystal- 
lized in the phrase, " What have we got to do 
with abroad ? " have jarred upon the nerves of 
many cultivated Americans. But it is no less 
true that a nation of pioneers and settlers, like 
the isolated individual, learns certain rough- 
and-ready Robinson Crusoe ways of getting 
things done. A California mining-camp is sure 
to establish law and order in due time, though 
never, perhaps, a law and order quite accord- 
ing to Blackstone. In the most trying crises of 
American political history, it was not, after all, 
a question of profiting by European experi- 
ence. Washington and Lincoln, in their sorest 
struggles, had nothing to do with "abroad"; 
the problem had first to be thought through, 
and then fought through, in American and not 
in European terms. Not a half-dozen English- 
men understood the bearings of the Kansas- 
Nebraska Bill, or, if they did, we were little the 
wiser. We had to wait until a slow-minded 
frontier lawyer mastered it in all its implica- 

[6i ] 



The American Mind 

tions, and then patiently explained it to the 
farmers of Illinois, to the United States, and 
to the world. 

It is true that the unsophisticated mode of 
procedure may turn out to be sheer folly, — 
a " sixteen to one " triumph of provincial bar- 
barism. But sometimes it is the secret of fresh- 
ness and of force. Your cross-country runner 
scorns the highway, but that is because he has 
confidence in his legs and loins, and he likes 
to take the fences. Fenimore Cooper, when 
he began to write stories, knew nothing about 
the art of novel-making as practised in Eu- 
rope, but he possessed something infinitely 
better for him, namely, instinct, and he took 
the right road to the climax of a narrative as 
unerringly as the homing bee follows its view- 
less trail. 

No one can be unaware how easily this 
superb American confidence may turn to over- 
confidence, to sheer recklessness. We love to 
run past the signals, in our railroading and in 
our thinking. Emerson will "plunge" on a 
new idea as serenely as any stock-gambler ever 
" plunged " in Wall Street, and a pretty school- 
teacher will tell you that she has become an 

[62] 



The American Mind 

advocate of the " New Thought " as compla- 
cently as an old financier will boast of having 
bought Calumet and Hecla when it was sell- 
ing at 25. (Perhaps the school-teacher may get 
as good a bargain. I cannot say.) Upon the 
whole, Americans back individual guesswork 
and pay cheerfully when they lose. A great 
many of them, as it happens, have guessed 
right. Even those who continue to guess 
wrong, like Colonel Sellers, have the indefeas- 
ible romantic appetite for guessing again. The 
American temperament and the chances of 
American history have brought constant tempt- 
ation to speculation, and plenty of our people 
prefer to gamble upon what they love to call 
a " proposition," rather than to go to the 
bottom of the facts. They would rather spec- 
ulate than know. 

Doubtless there are purely physical causes 
that have encouraged this mental attitude, 
such as the apparently inexhaustible resources 
of a newly opened country, the conscious- 
ness of youthful energy, the feeling that any 
very radical mistake in pitching camp to-day 
can easily be rectified when we pitch camp 
to-morrow. The habit of exaggeration which 

1 63 ] 



The American Mind 

was so particularly annoying to English vis- 
itors in the middle of the last century — annoy- 
ing even to Charles Dickens, who was him- 
self something of an expert in exuberance — 
is a physical and moral no less than a mental 
quality. That monstrous braggadocio which 
Dickens properly satirized in Martin Cbuz- 
zlewit was partly, of course, the product of 
provincial ignorance. Doubtless there were, 
and there are still, plenty of Pograms who are 
convinced that Henry Clay and Daniel Web- 
ster overtop all the intellectual giants of the 
Old World. But that youthful bragging, and 
perhaps some of the later bragging as well, has 
its social side. It is a perverted idealism. It 
springs from group loyalty, from sectional 
fidelity. The settlement of " Eden " may be 
precisely what Dickens drew it : a miasmatic 
mud-hole. Yet we who are interested in the 
new town do not intend, as the popular phrase 
has it, " to give ourselves away." We back 
our own " proposition," so that to this day 
Chicago cannot tell the truth to St. Louis, nor 
Harvard to Yale. Braggadocio thus gets glori- 
fied through its rootage in loyalty; and like- 
wise extravagance — surely one of the worst 

[64] 



The American Mind 

of American mental vices — is often based 
upon a romantic confidence in individual opin- 
ion or in the righteousness of some specific 
cause. Convince a blue-blooded American like 
Wendell Phillips that the abolition of slavery 
is right, and, straightway, words and even facts 
become to him mere weapons in a splendid 
warfare. His statements grow rhetorical, reck- 
less, virulent. Proof seems to him, as it did to 
the contemporary Transcendentalist philoso- 
phers, an impertinence. The sole question is, 
" Are you on the Lord's side ? " i.e., on the 
side of Wendell Phillips. 

Excuse as we may the faults of a gifted 
combatant in a moral crisis like the abolition 
controversy, the fact remains that the intel- 
lectual dangers of the oratorical temperament 
are typically American. What is common- 
ly called our " Fourth of July " period has 
indeed passed away. It has few apologists, 
perhaps fewer than it really deserves. It is 
possible to regret the disappearance of that 
old-fashioned assertion of patriotism and pride, 
and to question whether historical pageants 
and a "noiseless Fourth" will develop any 
better citizens than the fathers were. But on 

[65] 



The American Mind 

the purely intellectual side, the influence of 
that spread-eagle oratory was disastrous. 
Throughout wide-extended regions of the 
country, and particularly in the South and 
West, the " orator " grew to be, in the pop- 
ular mind, the normal representative of intel- 
lectual ability. Words, rather than things, 
climbed into the saddle. Popular assemblies 
were taught the vocabulary and the logic of 
passion, rather than of sober, lucid reasoning. 
The " stump " grew more potent than school- 
house and church and bench ; and it taught 
its reckless and passionate ways to more than 
one generation. The intellectual leaders of the 
newer South have more than once suffered 
ostracism for protesting against this glorifica- 
tion of mere oratory. But it is not the South 
alone that has suffered. Wherever a mob can 
gather, there are still the dangers of the old 
demagogic vocabulary and rhetoric. The mob 
state of mind is lurking still in the excitable 
American temperament. 

The intellectual temptations of that temper- 
ament are revealed no less in our popular jour- 
nalism. This journalism, it is needless to say, 
is extremely able, but it is reckless to the last 

[66] 



The American Mind 

degree. The extravagance of its head-lines and 
the over-statements of its news columns are 
direct sources of profit, since they increase the 
circulation and it is circulation which wins 
advertising space. I think it is fair to say that 
the American people, as a whole, like precisely 
the sort of journalism which they get. The 
tastes of the dwellers in cities control, more 
and more, the character of our newspapers. 
The journals of New York, Chicago, and San 
Francisco are steadily gaining in circulation, in 
resourcefulness, and in public spirit, but they 
are, for the most part, unscrupulous in attack, 
sophistical, and passionate. They outvie the 
popular pulpit in sentimentality. They play 
with fire. 

The note of exaggeration which is heard in 
American oratory and journalism is struck 
again in the popular magazines. Their com- 
paign of " exposure," during the last decade, 
has been careless of individual and corporate 
rights and reputations. Even the magazine 
sketches and short stories are keyed up to a 
hysteric pitch. So universally is this character- 
istic national tension displayed in our period- 
ical literature that no one is much surprised to 

[67] 



The American Mind 

read in his morning paper that some one has 
called the President of the United States a liar, 
— or that some one has been called a liar by 
the President of the United States. 

For an explanation of these defects, shall we 
fall back upon a convenient maxim of De 
Tocqueville*s and admit with him that "a de- 
mocracy is unsuited to meditation"? We are 
forced to do so. But then comes the inevitable 
second thought that a democracy must needs 
have other things than meditation to attend to. 
Athenian and Florentine and Versailles types 
of political despotism have all proved highly 
favorable to the lucubrations of philosophers 
and men of letters who enjoyed the despot*s 
approbation. For that matter, no scheme of 
life was ever better suited to meditation than 
an Indian reservation in the eigh teen-seven- 
ties, with a Great Father in Washington to fur- 
nish blankets, flour, and tobacco. Yet that is 
not quite the American ideal of existence, and 
it even failed to produce the peaceable fruits 
of meditation in the Indian himself. 

One may freely admit the shortcomings of 
the American intelligence; the "commonness 
of mind and tone " which Mr. Bryce beheves 

[68] 



The American Mind 

to be inseparable from the presence of such 
masses of men associated under modern de- 
mocratic government ; the frivolity and extra- 
vagance which represent the gasconading of the 
romantic temper in face of the grey practical- 
ities of everyday routine; the provincial boast- 
fulness and bad taste which have resulted from 
intellectual isolation ; the lack, in short, of a 
code, whether for thought or speech or beha- 
vior. And nevertheless, one's instinctive Amer- 
icanism replies. May it not be better, after 
all, to have gone without a code for a while, to 
have lacked that orderly and methodized and 
socialized European intelligence, and to have 
had the glorious sense of bringing things to 
pass in spite of it? There is just one thing that 
would have been fatal to our democracy. It is 
the feeling expressed in La Bruyere's famous 
book: "Everything has been said, everything 
has been written, everything has been done.'* 
Here in America everything was to do ; we 
were forced to conjugate our verbs in the fu- 
ture tense. No doubt our existence has been, 
in some respects, one of barbarism, but it has 
been the barbarism of life and not of death. A 
rawboned baby sprawling on the mud floor 

[69 ] 



The American Mind 

of a Kentucky log cabin is a more hopeful 
spectacle than a wholly civilized funeral. 

" Perhaps it is/' rejoins the European critic, 
somewhat impatiently, " but you are confusing 
the issue. We find certain grave defects in the 
American mind, defects which, if you had not 
had what Thomas Carlyle called * a great deal 
of land for a very few people/ would long ago 
have involved you in disaster. You admit the 
mental defects, but you promptly shift the 
question to one of moral qualities, of practical 
energy, of subduing your wilderness, and so 
forth. You have too often absented yourself 
from the wedding banquet, from the European 
symposium of wit and philosophy, from the 
polished and orderly and delightful play and 
interplay of civilized mind, — and your excuse 
is the old one : that you are trying your yoke 
of oxen and cannot come. We charge you with 
intellectual sins, and you enter the plea of 
moral preoccupation. If you will permit per- 
sonal examples, you Americans have made ere 
now your national heroes out of men whose 
reasoning powers remained those of a college 
sophomore, who were unable to state an oppo- 
nent's position with fairness, who lacked wholly 

[70] 



The American Mind 

the judicial quality, who were vainglorious and 
extravagant, who had, in short, the mind of an 
exuberant barbarian ; but you instantly forget 
their intellectual defects in the presence of their 
abounding physical and moral energy, their 
freedom from any taint of personal corruption, 
their whole-souled desire and effort for the 
public good. Were not such heroes, impossi- 
ble as they would have been in any other civ- 
ilized country, perfectly illuminative of your 
national state of mind?" 

For one, I confess that I do not know what 
reply to make to my imaginary European critic. 
I suspect that he is right. At any rate, we stand 
here at the fork of the road. If we do not wish to 
linger any longer over a catalogue of intellectual 
sins, let us turn frankly to our moral preoccu- 
pations, comforting ourselves, if we like, as we 
abandon the field of purely intellectual rivalry 
with Europe, in the reflection that it is the 
muddle-headed Anglo-Saxon, after all, who is 
the dominant force in the modern world. 

The moral temper of the American people X 
has been analyzed no less frequently than their 
mental traits. Foreign and native observers are 
alike agreed in their recognition of the extra- 

[71 ] 



The American Mind 

ordinary American energy. The sheer power 
of the American bodily machine, driven by the 
American will, is magnificent. It is often driven 
too hard, and with reckless disregard of any- 
thing save immediate results. It wears out more 
quickly than the bodily machine of the English- 
man. It is typical that the best distance runners 
of Great Britain usually beat ours, while we beat 
them in the sprints. Our public men are fre- 
quently — as the athletes say — "all in " at 
sixty. Their energy is exhausted at just the time 
that many an English statesman begins his best 
public service. But after making every allow- 
ance for wasteful excess, for the restless and im- 
patient consumption of nervous forces which 
nature intended that we should hold in reserve, 
the fact remains that American history has de- 
monstrated the existence of a dynamic national 
energy, physical and moral, which is still un- 
abated. Immigration has turned hitherward the 
feet of millions upon millions of young men 
from the hardiest stocks of Europe. They re- 
plenish the slackening streams of vigor. When 
the northern New Englander cannot make a 
living on the old farm, the French Canadian 
takes it off his hands, and not only improves 

[72] 



The American Mind 

the farm, but raises big crops of boys. So with 
Italians, Swedes, Germans, Irish, Jews, and 
Portuguese, and all the rest. We are a nation 
of immigrants, a digging, hewing, building, 
breeding, bettering race, of mixed blood and 
varying creeds, but of fundamental faith in the 
wages of going on ; a race compounded of ma- 
terials crude but potent ; raw, but with blood 
that is red and bones that are big ; a race that is 
accomplishing its vital tasks, and, little by little, 
transmuting brute forces and material energies 
into the finer play of mind and spirit. 

From the very beginning, the American ^ 
people have been characterized by idealism. It 
was the inner light of Pilgrim and Quaker col- 
onists ; it gleams no less in the faces of the child- 
ren of Russian Jew immigrants to-day. Amer- 
ican irreverence has been noted by many a for- 
eign critic, but there are certain subjects in 
whose presence our reckless or cynical speech 
is hushed. Compared with current Continental 
humor, our characteristic American humor is 
peculiarly reverent. The purity of woman and 
the reality of religion are not considered topics 
for jocosity. Cleanness of body and of mind are j^ 
held by our young men to be not only desirable 

[73] 



\ 



The American Mind 

but attainable virtues. There is among us, in 
comparison with France or Germany, a defect- 
ive reverence for the State as such ; and a 
positive irreverence towards the laws of the 
Commonwealth, and towards the occupants of 
high political positions. Mayor, Judge, Gov- 
ernor, Senator, or even President, may be the 
butt of such indecorous ridicule as shocks or 
disgusts the foreigner; but nevertheless the 
personal joke stops short of certain topics which 
Puritan tradition disapproves. The United 
States is properly called a Christian nation, 
not merely because the Supreme Court has so 
affirmed it, but because the phrase " a Christ- 
ian nation " expresses the historical form which 
the religious idealism of the country has made 
its own. The Bible is still considered, by the 
mass of the people, a sacred book ; oaths in 
courts of law, oaths of persons elected to great 
office, are administered upon it. American 
faith in education, as all the world knows, has 
from the beginning gone hand in hand with 
faith in religion ; the school-house was almost 
as sacred a symbol as the meeting-house ; and 
the munificence of American private benefac- 
tions to the cause of education furnishes to- 

[74] 



The American Mind 

day one of the most striking instances of ideal- 
ism in the history of civilization. 

The ideal passions of patriotism, of liberty, 
of loyalty to home and section, of humanitarian 
and missionary effort, have all burned with a 
clear flame in the United States. The optim- 
ism which lies so deeply embedded in the 
American character is one phase of the na- 
tional mind. Charles Eliot Norton once said 
to me, with his dry humor, that there was an 
infallible test of the American authorship of 
any anonymous article or essay : " Does it con- 
tain the phrase ' After all, we need not des- 
pair*? If it does, it was written by an Amer- 
ican." In spite of all that is said about the 
practicality of the American, his love of gain 
and his absorption in material interests, those 
who really know him are aware how habitually 
he confronts his practical tasks in a spirit of 
romantic enthusiasm. He marches downtown 
to his prosaic day's job and calls it "playing 
the game '* ; to work as hard as he can is to 
"get into the game," and to work as long as 
he can is to "stay in the game " ; he loves to 
win fully as much as the Jew and he hates to 
lose fully as much as the Englishman, but 

[75] 



The American Mind 

losing or winning, he carries into his business 
activity the mood of the ideaHst. 

It is easy to think of all this as self-decep- 
tion ; as the emotional effusiveness of the 
American temperament ; but to refuse to see 
its idealism is to mistake fundamentally the 
character of the American man. No doubt he 
does deceive himself often as to his real mo- 
tives : he is a mystic and a bargain-hunter by 
turns. Divided aims, confused ideals, have 
struggled for the mastery among us, ever since 
Challon's Voyage^ in 1606, announced that the 
purpose of the first colonists to Virginia was 
*'both to seek to convert the savages, as also 
to seek out what benefits or commodities 
might be had in those parts." How that 
" both " — " as also " keeps echoing in Amer- 
ican history : " both " to christianize the Negro 
and work him at a profit, " both " duty and 
advantage in retaining the Philippines; "both" 
international good will and increased arma- 
ments ; " both " Sunday morning precepts and 
Monday morning practice ; " both " horns of 
a dilemma ; " both God and mammon " ; did 
ever a nation possess a more marvellous 
water-tight compartment method of believing 

[76] 



The American Mind 

and honoring opposites ! But in all this un- 
conscious hypocrisy the American is perhaps 
not worse — though he may be more absurd! 
— than other men. 

Another aspect of the American mind is V 
found in our radicalism. " To be an Amer- ' 
ican," it has been declared, "is to be a radical." 
That statement needs qualification. Intellect- 
ually the American is inclined to radical views ; 
he is willing to push certain social theories 
very far ; he will found a new religion, a new 
philosophy, a new socialistic community, at 
the slightest notice or provocation; but he has 
at bottom a fund of moral and political con- 
servatism. Thomas Jefferson, one of the great- 
est of our radical idealists, had a good deal of 
the English squire in him after all. JefFerson- 
ianism endures, not merely because it is a rad- 
ical theory of human nature, but because it 
expresses certain facts of human nature. The 
American mind looks forward, not back ; but 
in practical details of land, taxes, and govern- 
mental machinery we are instinctively cautious 
of change. The State of Connecticut knows 
that her constitution is ill adapted to the pre- 
sent conditions of her population, but the dif- 

[77] 



The American Mind 

ficulty is to persuade the rural legislators to 
amend it. Yet everybody admits that amend- 
ment will come "some day." This admission 
is a characteristic note of American feeling ; 
and every now and then come what we call 
" uplift " movements, when radicalism is in 
the very air, and a thousand good " causes " 
take fresh vigor. 

One such period was in the New England 
of the eighteen-forties. We are moving in a 
similar — only this time a national — current 
of radicalism, to-day. But a change in the 
weather or the crops has before now turned 
many of our citizens from radicalism into con- 
servatism. There is, in fact, conservatism in 
our blood and radicalism in our brains, and 
now one and now the other rules. Very typ- 
ical of American radicalism is that story of the 
old sea-captain who was ignorant, as was sup- 
posed, of the science of navigation, and who 
cheerfully defended himself by saying that he 
could work his vessel down to Boston Light 
without knowing any navigation, and after that 
he could go where he " dum pleased." I sus- 
pect the old fellow pulled his sextant and 
chronometer out of his chest as soon as he 

[78] 



The American Mind 

really needed them. American radicalism is 
not always as innocent of the world's expe- 
rience as it looks. In fact, one of the most 
interesting phases of this twentieth century 
" uplift " movement is its respect and even 
glorification of expert opinion. A German ex- 
pert in city-planning electrifies an audience of 
Chicago club-women by talking to them about 
drains, ash-carts, and flower-beds. A hundred 
other experts, in sanitation, hygiene, chemis- 
try, conservation of natural resources, govern- 
ment by commission, tariffs, arbitration treat- 
ies, are talking quite as busily ; and they have 
the attention of a national audience that is 
listening with genuine modesty, and with a real 
desire to refashion American life on wiser and 
nobler plans. In this national forward move- 
ment in which we are living, radicalism has 
shown its beneficent aspect of constructive 
idealism. . 

No catalogue of American qualities and de- ^*^ 
fects can exclude the trait of individualism. 
We exalt character over institutions, says Mr. 
Brownell ; we like our institutions because they 
suit us, and not because we admire institutions. 
" Produce great persons," declares Walt Whit- 

[79] 



The American Mind 

man, " the rest follows." Whether the rest fol- 
lows or not, there can be no question that 
Americans, from the beginning, have laid sin- 
gular stress upon personal qualities. The relig- 
ion and philosophy of the Puritans were in 
this respect at one with the gospel of the fron- 
tier. It was the principle of " every man for 
himself" ; solitary confrontation of his God, 
solitary struggle with the wilderness. " He 
that will not work," declared John Smith after 
that first disastrous winter at Jamestown, 
" neither let him eat." The pioneer must 
clear his own land, harvest his own crops, 
defend his own fireside; his temporal and 
eternal salvation were strictly his own affair. 
He asked, and expected, no aid from the com- 
munity; he could at most "change works" 
in time of harvest, with a neighbor, if he had 
one. It was the sternest school of self-reliance, 
from babyhood to the grave, that human 
society is ever likely to witness. It bred he- 
roes and cranks and hermits ; its glories and 
its eccentricities are written in the pages of 
Emerson, Thoreau, and Whitman ; they are 
written more permanently still in the instinct- 
ive American faith in individual manhood. 

[80] 



The American Mind 

Our democracy idolizes a few individuals ; it 
ignores their defective training, or, it may be, 
their defective culture; it likes to think of an 
Andrew Jackson who was a " lawyer, judge, 
planter, merchant, general, and politician,*' be- 
fore he became President; it asks only that the 
man shall not change his individual character 
in passing from one occupation or position to 
another; in fact, it is amused and proud to 
think of Grant hauling cordwood to market, of 
Lincoln keeping store or Roosevelt round- 
ing-up cattle. The one essential question was 
put by Hawthorne into the mouth of Holgravc 
in the House of the Seven Gables, Holgrave had 
been by turns a schoolmaster, clerk in a store, 
editor, pedler, lecturer on Mesmerism, and 
daguerreotypist, but " amid all these personal 
vicissitudes," says Hawthorne, " he had never 
lost his identity. . . . He had never violated 
the innermost man, but had carried his con- 
science along with him." There speaks the 
local accent of Puritanism, but the voice insist- 
ing upon the moral integrity of the individual 
is the undertone of America. \ 

Finally, and surely not the least notable of 
American traits, is public spirit. Triumphant 

[8, ] 



The American Mind 

individualism checks itself, or is rudely checked 
in spite of itself, by considerations of the gen- 
eral good. How often have French critics con- 
fessed, with humiliation, that in spite of the 
superior socialization of the French intelligence, 
France has yet to learn from America the art 
and habit of devoting individual fortunes to 
the good of the community. Our American 
literature, as has been already pointed out, is 
characteristically a citizen literature, responsive 
to the civic note, the production of men who, 
like the writers of the Federalist^ applied a vig- 
orous practical intelligence, a robust common 
sense, to questions affecting the interest of 
everybody. The spirit of fair play in our free 
democracy has led Americans to ask not merely 
what is right and just for one, the individual, 
but what are righteousness and justice and fair 
play for all. Democracy, as embodied in such 
a leader as Lincoln, has meant Fellowship. 
Nothing finer can be said of a representative 
American than to say of him, as Mr. Norton 
said of Mr. Lowell, that he had a " most pub- 
lic soul." 

No one can present such a catalogue of 
American qualities as I have attempted without 

[82] 



The American Mind 

realizing how much escapes his classification. 
Conscious criticism and assessment of national 
characteristics is essential to an understanding 
of them ; but one feels somehow that the net is 
not holding. The analysis of English racial in- 
heritances, as modified by historical conditions, 
yields much, no doubt ; but what are we to say 
of such magnificent embodiments of the Amer- 
ican spirit as are revealed in the Swiss immi- 
grant Agassiz, the German exile Carl Schurz, 
the native-born mulatto Booker Washington ? 
The Americanism of representative Americans 
is something which must be felt ; it is to be 
reached by imaginative perception and sym- 
pathy, no less than by the process of formal 
analysis. It would puzzle the experts in racial 
tendencies to find arithmetically the common 
denominator of such American figures as Frank- 
lin, Washington, Jackson, Webster, Lee, Lin- 
coln, Emerson, and " Mark Twain " ; yet the 
countrymen of those typical Americans instinct- 
ively recognize in them a sort of largeness, ^ 
genuineness, naturalness, kindliness, humor, 
effectiveness, idealism, which are indubitably 
and fundamentally American. 

There are certain sentiments of which we 

[83 ] 



The American Mind^ 

ourselves are conscious, though we can scarcely 
translate them into words, and these vaguely 
felt emotions of admiration, of effort, of fellow- 
ship and social faith are the invisible America. 
Take, for a single example, the national admira- 
tion for what we call a " self-made " man : here 
is a boy selling candy and newspapers on a 
Michigan Central train; he makes up his mind 
to be a lawyer ; in twelve years from that day 
he is general counsel for the Michigan Central 
road; he enters the Senate of the United States 
and becomes one of its leading figures. The in- 
stinctive flush of sympathy and pride with which 
Americans listen to such a story is far more 
deeply based than any vulgar admiration for 
money-making abilities. No one cares whether 
such a man is rich or poor. He has vindicated 
anew the possibilities of manhood under Amer- 
ican conditions of opportunity ; the miracle of 
our faith has in him come true once m.ore. 

No one can understand America with his 
brains. It is too big, too puzzling. It tempts, 
and it deceives. But many an illiterate immi- 
grant has felt the true America in his pulses 
before he ever crossed the Atlantic. The de- 
scendant of the Pilgrims still remains ignorant 

[84] 



The American Mind 

of our national life if he does not respond to its 
glorious zest, its throbbing energy, its forward 
urge, its uncomprehending belief in the future, 
its sense of the fresh and mighty world just 
beyond to-day's horizon. Whitman's " Pio- 
neers, O Pioneers " is one of the truest of 
American poems because it beats with the pulse 
of this onward movement, because it is full of 
this laughing and conquering fellowship and 
of undefeated faith. 



Ill 

American Idealism 

Our endeavor to state the general character- 
istics of the American mind has already given 
us some indication of what Americans really 
care for. The things or the qualities which 
they like, the objects of their conscious or un- 
conscious striving, are their ideals. "There 
is what I call the American idea/' said Theo- 
dore Parker in the Anti-Slavery Convention 
of 1850. "This idea demands, as the proxim- 
ate organization thereof, a democracy — that 
is, a government of all the people, by all the 
people, for all the people ; of course, a govern- 
ment on the principle of eternal justice, the 
unchanging law of God ; for shortness' sake, I 
will call it the idea of Freedom." That is one 
of a thousand definitions of American idealism. 
Books devoted to the "Spirit of America" — 
like the volume by Henry van Dyke which 
bears that very title — give a programme of 

[86] 



American Idealism 

national accomplishments and aspirations. But 
our immediate task is more specific. It is to 
point out how adequately this idealistic side of 
the national temperament has been expressed 
in American writing. Has our literature kept 
equal pace with our thinking and feeling ? 

We do not need, in attempting to answer 
this question, any definition of idealism, in its 
philosophical or in its more purely literary 
sense. There are certain fundamental human 
sentiments which lift men above brutes. French- 
men above " frog-eaters," and Englishmen 
above "shop-keepers." These ennobling senti- 
ments or ideals, while universal in their essen- 
tial nature, assume in each civilized nation a 
somewhat specific coloring. The national lit- 
erature reveals the myriad shades and hues of 
private and public feeling, and the more truth- 
ful this literary record, the more delicate and 
noble become the harmonies of local and na- 
tional thought or emotion with the universal 
instincts and passions of mankind. On the 
other hand, when the literature of Spain, for 
instance, or of Italy, fails, within a given period, 
in range and depth of human interest, we are 
compelled to behevc either that the Spain or 

[87] 



The American Mind 

Italy of that age was wanting in the nobler 
ideals, or that it lacked literary interpretation. 

In the case of America we are confronted by 
a similar dilemma. Since the beginning of the 
seventeenth century this country has been, in 
a peculiar sense, the home of idealism ; but our 
literature has remained through long periods 
thin and provincial, barren in cosmopolitan 
significance; and the hard fact faces us to-day 
that only three or four of our writers have 
aroused any strong interest in the cultivated 
readers of continental Europe. Evidently, then, 
either the torch of American idealism does not 
burn as brightly as we think, or else our writ- 
ers, with but few exceptions, have not hitherto 
possessed the height and reach and grasp to 
hold up the torch so that the world could see 
it. Let us look first at the flame, and then at 
the torch-bearers. 

Readers of Carlyle have often been touched 
by the humility with which that disinherited 
child of Calvinism speaks of Goethe's doctrine 
of the "Three Reverences," as set forth in TVil- 
helm Meister, Again and again, in his corre- 
spondence and his essays, does Carlyle recur 
to that teaching of the threefold Reverence : 

[88] 



American Idealism 

Reverence for what is above us, for what is 
around us and for what is under us ; that is to 
say, the ethnic rehgion which frees us from de- 
basing fear, the philosophical religion which 
unites us with our comrades, and the Christian 
religion which recognizes humility and poverty 
and suffering as divine. 

" To which of these religions do you speci- 
ally adhere ?" inquired Wilhelm. 

" To all the three," replied the sages ; " for 
in their union they produce what may properly 
be called the true Religion. Out of those three 
Reverences springs the highest Reverence, 
Reverence for Oneself." 

An 'admirable symbolism, surely; vaguer, 
no doubt, than the old symbols which Carlyle 
had learned in the Kirk at Ecclefechan, but 
less vague, in turn, than that doctrine of rever- 
ence for the Oversoul, which was soon to be 
taught at Concord. 

As one meditates upon the idealism of the 
first colonists in America, one is tempted to ask 
what their " reverences " were. Toward what 
tangible symbols of the invisible did their eyes 
instinctively turn ? 

For New England, at least, the answer is 

[ 89] 



The American Mind 

relatively simple. One form of it is contained 
in John Adams's well-known prescription for 
Virginia, as recorded in his Diary for July 21, 
1786. "Major Langbourne dined with us 
again. He was lamenting the difference of char- 
acter between Virginia and New England. I 
offered to give him a receipt for making a New 
England in Virginia. He desired it; and I re- 
commended to him town-meetings, training- 
days, town-schools, and ministers.'* 

The " ministers," it will be noticed, come 
last on the Adams list. But the order of pre- 
cedence is unimportant. 

Here are four symbols, or, if you like, " re- 
verences.'* Might not the Virginia planters, 
loyal to their own specific symbol of the " gen- 
tleman," — no unworthy ideal, surely; one 
that had been glorified in European literature 
ever since Castiligione wrote his Courtier y and 
one that had been transplanted from England 
to Virginia as soon as Sir Walter Raleigh's men 
set foot on the soil which took its name from 
the Virgin Queen, — might not the Virginia 
gentlemen have pondered to their profit over 
the blunt suggestion of the Massachusetts com- 
moner ? No doubt ; and yet how much pictur- 

[90] 



American Idealism 

esqueness and nobility — and tragedy, too — 
we should have missed, if our history had not 
been full of these varying symbols, clashing 
ideals, different Reverences! 

One Reverence, at least, was common to the 
Englishman of Virginia and to the Englishman 
of Plymouth and Massachusetts Bay. They 
were joint heirs of the Reformation, children of 
that waxing and puissant England which was a 
nation of one book, the Bible ; a book whose 
phrases color alike the Faerie ^een of Spen- 
ser and the essays of Francis Bacon; a book 
rich beyond all others in human experience ; 
full of poetry, history, drama; the test of con- 
duct ; the manual of devotion ; and above all, 
and blinding all other considerations by the 
very splendor of the thought, a book believed 
to be the veritable Word of the unseen God. 
For these colonists in the wilderness, as for the 
Protestant Europe which they had left irrevo- 
cably behind them, the Bible was the plainest 
of all symbols of idealism : it was the first of 
the " Reverences." 

The Church was a symbol likewise, but to 
the greater portion of colonial America the 
Church meant chiefly the tangible band of 

[ 91 ] 



The American Mind 

militant believers within the limits of a certain 
township or parish, rather than the mystical 
Bride of Christ. Except in Maryland and Vir- 
ginia, whither the older forms of Church wor- 
ship were early transplanted, there was scanty 
reverence for the Establishment. There was 
neither clergyman nor minister on board the 
Mayflower. In Rufus Choate*s oration on the 
Pilgrims before the New England Society of 
New York in 1843, occurred the famous sen- 
tence about " a church without a bishop and a 
state without a King " ; to which Dr. Wain- 
wright, rector of St. John's, replied wittily at 
the dinner following the oration that there 
" can be no church without a bishop." This is 
perhaps a question for experts ; but Thomas 
Hooker, Thomas Shepard, and John Cotton 
would have sided with Rufus Choate. The awe 
which had once been paid to the Establishment 
was transferred, in the seventeenth-century 
New England, to the minister. The minister 
imposed himself upon the popular imagination, 
partly through sheer force of personal ascend- 
ency, and partly as a symbol of the theocracy, 
— the actual governing of the Commonwealth 
by the laws and spirit of the sterner Scriptures. 

[92] 



AmericVn Idealism 

The minister dwelt apart as upon an awful 
Sinai. It was no mere romantic fancy of Haw- 
thorne that shadowed his countenance with a 
black veil. The church organization, too, — 
though it may have lacked its bishop, — had 
a despotic power over its communicants ; to be 
cast out of its fellowship involved social and 
political consequences comparable to those fol- 
lowing excommunication by the Church of 
Rome. Hawthorne and Whittier and Long- 
fellow — all of them sound antiquarians, 
though none of them in sympathy with the 
theology of Puritanism — have described in 
fit terms the bareness of the New England 
meeting-house. What intellectual severity and 
strain was there; what prodigality of learning; 
what blazing intensity of devotion ; what pathos 
of women's patience, and of children, prema- 
turely old, stretched upon the rack of insoluble 
problems! What dramas of the soul were 
played through to the end in those barn-like 
buildings, where the musket, perhaps, stood in 
the corner of the pew ! " How aweful is this 
place ! '' must have been murmured by the 
lips of all ; though there were many who have 
added, " This is the gate of Heaven." 

[ 93 ] 



The American Mind 

The gentler side of colonial religion is win- 
ningly portrayed in Whittier's Pennsylvania 
Pilgrim and in his imaginary journal of Mar- 
garet Smith. There were sunnier slopes, warmer 
exposures for the ripening of the human spirit, 
in the Southern colonies. Even in New Eng- 
land there was sporadic revolt from the begin- 
ning. The number of non-church-members in- 
creased rapidly after 1700; Franklin as a youth 
in Boston admired Cotton Mather's ability, but 
he did not go to church, " Sunday being my 
studying day." Doubtless there were always 
humorous sceptics like Mrs. Stowe's delight- 
ful Sam Lawson in Oldtown Folks. Lawson's 
comment on Parson Simpson*s service epitom- 
izes two centuries of New England thinking. 
" Wal," said Sam, " Parson Simpson's a smart 
man ; but I tell ye, it *s kind o* discouragin'. 
Why, he said our state and condition by natur 
was just like this. We was clear down in a well 
fifty feet deep, and the sides all round nothin* 
but glare ice; but we was under immediate ob- 
ligations to get out, 'cause we was free, volun- 
tary agents. But nobody ever had got out^ and 
nobody would, unless the Lord reached down 
and took 'em. And whether he would or not 

[94] 



American Idealism 

nobody could tell; it was all sovereignty. He 
said there wan't one in a hundred, not one in 
a thousand, — not one in ten thousand, — that 
would be saved. Lordy massy, says I to myself, 
ef that *s so they 're any of 'em welcome to my 
chance. And so I kind o^ ris up and come out'' 

Mrs. Stowe's novel is fairly representative 
of a great mass of derivative literature which 
draws its materials from the meeting-house 
period of American history. But the direct lit- 
erature of that period has passed almost wholly 
into oblivion. Jonathan Edwards had one of 
the finest minds of his century ; no European 
standard of comparison is too high for him ; he 
belongs with Pascal, with Augustine, if you like, 
with Dante. But his great treatises written in 
the Stockbridge woods are known only to a few 
technical students of philosophy. One terrible 
sermon, preached at Enfield in 1741, is still 
read by the curious ; but scarcely anybody knows 
of the ineffable tenderness, dignity, and pathos 
of his farewell sermon to his flock at North- 
ampton : and the Yale Library possesses nearly 
twelve hundred of Edwards's sermons which 
have never been printed at all. Nor does any- 
body, save here and there an antiquarian, read 

[95] 



The American Mind 

Shepard and Hooker and Mayhew. And yet 
these preachers and their successors furnished 
the emotional equivalents of great prose and 
verse to generations of men. "That is poetry," 
says Professor Saintsbury (in a dangerous lat- 
itudinarianism, perhaps!), "which gives the 
reader the feeling of poetry." Here we touch 
one of the fundamental characteristics of our 
national state of mind, in its relation to litera- 
ture. We are careless of form and type, yet we 
crave the emotional stimulus. Milton, greatest 
of Puritan poets, was read and quoted all too 
seldom in the Puritan colonies, and yet those 
colonists were no strangers to the emotions of 
sublimity and awe and beauty. They found 
them in the meeting-house instead of in a book; 
precisely as, in a later day, millions of Ameri- 
cans experienced what was for them the emo- 
tional equivalent of poetry in the sermons of 
Henry Ward Beecher and Phillips Brooks. 
French pulpit oratory of the seventeenth cent- 
ury wins recognition as a distinct type of liter- 
ature; its great practitioners, like Massillon, 
Bourdaloue, Bossuet, are appraised in all the 
histories of the national literature and in books 
devoted to the evolution of literary species. In 

[96] 



American Idealism 

the American colonies the great preachers per- 
formed the functions of men of letters without 
knowing it. They have been treated with too 
scant respect in the histories of American lit- 
erature. It is one of the penalties of Protest- 
antism that the audiences, after a while, out- 
grow the preacher. The development of the 
historic sense, of criticism, of science, makes an 
impassable gulf between Jonathan Edwards 
and the American churches of the twentieth 
century. A sense of profound changes in theo- 
logy has left our contemporaries indifferent to 
the literature in which the old theology was 
clothed. 

There is one department of American liter- 
ary production, of which Bossuet's famous ser- 
mon on Queen Henrietta Maria of England 
may serve to remind us, which illustrates sig- 
nificantly the national idealism. I mean the 
commemorative oration. The addresses upon 
the Pilgrim Fathers by such orators as Everett, 
Webster, and Choate; the countless orations 
before such organizations as the New England 
Society of New York and the Phi Beta Kappa; 
the papers read before historical and patriotic 
societies ; the birthday and centenary discourses 

[97] 



The American Mind 

upon national figures like Washington or Lin- 
coln, have all performedj and are still perform- 
ing, an inestimable service in stimulating popu- 
lar loyalty to the idealism of the fathers. As 
literature, most of this production is derivative : 
we listen to eloquence about the Puritans, but 
we do not read the Puritans ; the description 
of Arthur Dimmesdale's election sermon in 
1'he Scarlet Letter ^ moving as it may be, tempts 
no one to open the stout collections of election 
sermons in the libraries. Yet the original liter- 
ature of mediaeval chivalry is known only to 
a few scholars: Tennyson's Idylls outsell the 
Mabinogion and Malory. The actual world of 
literature is always shop-worn ; a world chiefly 
of second-hand books, of warmed-over emo- 
tions ; and it is not surprising that many listen- 
ers to orations about Lincoln do not personally 
emulate Lincoln, and that many of the most 
enthusiastic dealers in the sentiment of the an- 
cestral meeting-house do not themselves attend 
church. 

The other ingredients of John Adams's ideal 
Commonwealth are no less significant of our 
national disposition. Take the school-house. 
It was planted in the wilderness for the training 

[ 98 ] 



American Idealism 

of boys and girls and for a future "godly and 
learned ministry." The record of American 
education is a long story of idealism which has 
touched literature at every turn. The " red 
school-house " on the hill-top or at the cross- 
roads, the "log-colleges" in forgotten hamlets, 
the universities founded by great states, are all 
a record of the American faith — which has 
sometimes been called a fetich — in education. 
In its origin, it was a part of the essential pro- 
gramme of Calvinism to make a man able to 
judge for himself upon the most momentous 
questions ; a programme, too, of that political 
democracy which lay embedded in the tenets 
of Calvinism, a democracy which believes and 
must continue to believe that an educated elect- 
orate can safeguard its own interests and train 
up its own leaders. The poetry of the Ameri- 
can school-house was written long ago by Whit- 
tier, in describing Joshua Coffin*s school under 
the big elm on the cross-road in East Haver- 
hill ; its humor and pathos and drama have been 
portrayed by innumerable story-writers and es- 
sayists. Mrs. Martha Baker Dunn's charming 
sketches, entitled " Cicero in Maine " and " Vir- 
gil in Maine," indicate the idealism once taught 

[99] 




>/ 



The American Mind 

in the old rural academies, — and it is taught 
there still. City men will stop wistfully on the 
street, in the first week of September, to watch 
the boys and girls go trudging off to their first 
day of school ; men who believe in nothing else 
at least believe in that ! And school and college 
and university remain, as in the beginning, the 
first garden-ground and the last refuge of liter- 
ature. 

That "town-meeting" which John Adams 
thought Virginia might do well to adopt has 
likewise become a symbol of American ideal- 
ism. Together with the training-day, it repre- 
sented the rights and duties and privileges of 
free men ; the machinery of self-government. 
It was democracy, rather than " representative " 
government, underits purest aspect. Sentiments 
of responsibility to the town, the political unit, 
and to the Commonwealth, the group of units, 
were bred there. Likewise, it was a training- 
school for sententious speech and weighty 
action ; its roots, as historians love to demon- 
strate, run back very far ; and though the modern 
drift to cities has made its machinery ineffective 
in the larger communities, it remains a perpet- 
ual spring or feeding stream to the broader cur- 

[ loo ] 



American Idealism 

rents of our national life. Without an under- 
standing of the town-meeting and its equiv- 
alents, our political literature loses much of its 
significance. Like the school-house and meet- V^ 
ing-house, it has become glorified by our men 
of letters. John Fiske and other historians 
have celebrated it in some of the most bril- 
liant pages of our political writing ; and that 
citizen literature, so deeply characteristic of us, 
found in the plain, forthright, and public-spir- 
ited tone of town-meeting discussions its key- 
note. The spectacular debates of our national 
history, the dramatic contests in the great arena 
of the Senate Chamber, the discussions before 
huge popular audiences in the West, have main- 
tained the civic point of view, have developed 
and dignified and enriched the prose style first 
employed by American freemen in deciding 
their local affairs in the presence of their neigh- 
bors. " I am a part of this people," said Lin- 
coln proudly in one of his famous debates of 
1858; "I was raised just a little east of here **; 
and this nearness to the audience, this directness 
and simplicity andgenuineness of our best polit- 
ical literature, its homely persuasiveness and 
force, is an inheritance of the town-meeting. 

[ lOI ] 



The American Mind 

Bible and meeting-house, school-house and 
town-meeting, thus illustrate concretely the 
responsiveness of the American character to 
\\ idealistic impulses. They are external symbols 
of a certain state of mind. It may indeed be 
urged that they are primarily signs of a moral 
and social or institutional trend, and are there- 
fore non-literary evidence of American ideal- 
ism. Nevertheless, institutional as they may be 
deemed, they lie close to that poetry of daily 
duty in which our literature has not been poor. 
They are fundamentally related to that atti- 
tude of mind, that habitual temper of the spirit, 
which has produced, in all countries of settled 
use and wont, the literature of idealism. Bru- 
netiere said of Flaubert's most famous woman 
character that poor Emma Bovary, the prey 
and the victim of Romantic desires, was after 
all much like the rest of us except that she 
lacked the intelligence to perceive the charm 
and poetry of the daily task. We have already 
touched upon the purely romantic side of 
American energy and of American imagina- 
tion, and we must shortly look more closely 
still at those impulses of daring, those moods 
of heightened feeling, that intensified individ- 

[ I02 ] 



American Idealism 

ualism, the quest of strangeness and terror and 
wild beauty, which characterize our romantic 
writing. But this romanticism is, as it were, a 
segment of the larger circle of idealism. It is 
idealism accentuated by certain factors, driven 
to self-expression by the passions of scorn or 
of desire; it exceeds, in one way or another, 
the normal range of experience and emotion. 
Our romantic American literature is doubtless 
our greatest. And yet some of the most char- 
acteristic tendencies of American writing are to 
be found in the poetry of daily experience, in 
the quiet accustomed light thatialls upon one's 
own doorway and garden, in the immemorial 
charm of going forth to one's labor and return- 
ing in the evening, — poetry old as the world. 

Let us see how this glow of Idealism touches 
some of the more intimate aspects of human ex- 
perience. " Out of the three Reverences," says 
Wilhelm Meister, " springs the highest Re- 
verence, Reverence for Oneself." Open the 
pages of Hawthorne. Moving wholly within 
the framework of established institutions, with 
no desire to shatter the existing scheme of 
social order, choosing as its heroes men of the 

[ 103 ] 



The American Mind 

meeting-house, town-meeting, and training- 
day, how intensely nevertheless does the imag- 
ination of this fiction-writer illuminate the Body 
and the Soul! 

Take first the Body. The inheritance of 
English Puritanism may be traced throughout 
our American writing, in its reverence for phys- 
ical purity. The result is something unique in 
literary history. Continental critics, while re- 
cognizing the intellectual and artistic powers 
revealed in T'he Scarlet Letter, have seldom 
realized the awfulness, to the Puritan mind, 
of the very thought of an adulterous minister. 
That a priest in southern Europe should break 
his vows is indeed scandalous ; but the sin is re- 
garded as a failure of the natural man to keep 
a vow requiring supernatural grace for its ful- 
filment ; it may be that the priest had no voca- 
tion for his sacred office ; he is unfrocked, pun- 
ished, forgotten, yet a certain mantle of human 
charity still covers his offence. But in the Pur- 
itan scheme (and "The Scarlet Letter, save for 
that one treacherous, warm human moment in 
the woodland where " all was spoken," lies 
wholly within the set framework of Puritan- 
ism) there is no forgiveness for a sin of the 

[ 104 ] 



American Idealism 

flesh. There is only Law, Law stretching on 
into infinitude until the mind shudders at it. 
Hawthorne knew his Protestant New England 
through and through. The Scarlet Letter is the 
most striking example in our national literature 
of that idealization of physical purity, but hun- 
dreds of other romances and poems, less mor- 
bid if less great, assert in unmistakable terms 
the same moral conviction, the same ideal. 

Yet, in spite of its theme, there was never a 
less adulterous novel than this book which plays 
so artistically with the letter A. The body is 
branded, is consumed, is at last, perhaps, trans- 
figured by the intense rays of light emitted from 
the suffering soul. 

'* The soul is form and doth the body make." 

In this intense preoccupation with the Soul, 
Hawthorne's romance is in unison with the 
more mystical and spiritual utterances of Cath- 
olicism as well as of Protestantism. It was in 
part a resultant of that early American isola- 
tion which contributed so effectively to the art- 
istic setting of 'The Scarlet Letter. But in his 
doctrine of spiritual integrity, in the agonized 
utterance, "Be true — be true !" as well as in 

[ 105] 



The American Mind 

his reverence for purity of the body, our great- 
est romancer was typical of the imaginative Ht- 
erature of his countrvmen. The restless artistic 
experiments of Poe presented the human body 
in many a ghastly and terrifying aspect of ill- 
ness and decav, and distorted bv all passions 
save one. His imagination was singularly sex- 
less. Pathological students have pointed out 
the relation between this characteristic of Poe's 
writing, and his known tendencies toward opi- 
um-eating, alcoholism, and tuberculosis. But 
no such explanation is at hand to elucidate the 
absence of sexual passion from the novels of 
the masculine-minded Fenimore Cooper. One 
may say, indeed, that Cooper's novels, like 
Scott's, lack intensity of spiritual vision ; that 
their tone is consonant with the views of a sound 
Church of England parson in the eighteenth 
century ; and that the absence of physical pas- 
sion, like the absence of purely spiritual insight, 
betrays a certain defect in Cooper's imaginative 
grasp and depth. But it is better criticism, after 
all, to remember that these three pioneers in 
American fiction-writing were composing for 
an audience in which Puritan traditions or tastes 
were predominant. Not one of the three men 

[ io6 ] 



American Idealism 

but would have instantly sacrificed an artistic 
effect, legitimate in the eyes of Fielding or 
Goethe or Balzac, rather than — in the phrase 
so often satirized — " bring a blush to the cheek 
of innocence." In other words, the presence 
of a specific audience, accustomed to certain 
Anglo-Saxon and Puritanic restraint of topic 
and of speech, has from the beginning of our 
imaginative literature cooperated with the in- 
stinct of our writers. That Victorian reticence 
which is so plainly seen even in such full-bodied 
writers as Dickens or Thackeray — a reticence 
which men like Mr. Bernard Shaw and Mr. 
Galsworthy and Mr. Wells think so hypocrit- 
ical and dangerous to society and which they 
have certainly done their utmost to abolish — 
has hitherto dominated our American writing. 
The contemporary influence of great Conti- 
nental writers to whom reticence is unknown, 
combined with the influence of a contemporary 
opera and drama to which reticence would be 
unprofitable, are now assaulting this dominant 
convention. Very possibly it is doomed. But 
it is only within recent years that its rule has 
been questioned. 

One result of it may, I think, be fairly ad- 

[ 107 ] 



The American Mind 

mitted. While very few writers of eminence, 
after all, in any country, wish to bring a " blush 
to the cheek of innocence," they naturally wish, 
as Thackeray put it in one of the best-known 
of his utterances, to be permitted to depict a 
man to the utmost of their power. American 
literary conventions, like English conventions, 
have now and again laid a restraining and com- 
pelling hand upon the legitimate exercise of this 
artistic instinct ; and this fact has cooperated 
with many social, ethical, and perhaps physio- 
logical causes to produce a thinness or blood- 
lessness in our books. They are graceful, pleas- 
ing, but pale, like one of those cool whitish 
uncertain skies of an American spring. They 
lack " body," like certain wines. It is not often 
that we can produce a real Burgundy. We have 
had many distinguished fiction-writers, but none 
with the physical gusto of a Fielding, a Smol- 
lett, or even a Dickens, who, idealist and ro- 
manticist as he was, and Victorian as were his 
artistic preferences, has this animal life which 
tingles upon every page. We must confess that 
there is a certain quality of American idealism 
which is covertly suspicious or openly hostile to 
the glories of bodily sensation. Emerson*s thin 

[ io8 ]. 



American Idealism 

high shoulders peep up reproachfully above the 
desk ; Lanier is playing his reproachful flute ; 
Longfellow reads Fremont's Rocky Mountain 
experiences while lying abed, and sighs " But, ah, 
the discomforts!"; Irving s j4 scoria, superb as 
were the possibilities of its physical background, 
tastes like parlor exploration. Even Dana's 
Before the Mast and Parkman's Oregon 'Trail, 
transcripts of robust actual experience, and ad- 
mirable books, reveal a sort of physical paleness 
compared with Turgenieff 's Notes of a Sports- 
man and Tolstoi's Sketches of Sebastopol and 
the Crimea. They are Harvard undergraduate 
writing, after all! 

These facts illustrate anew that standing 
temptation of the critic of American literature to 
palhate literary shortcomings by the plea that we 
possess certain admirable non-literary qualities. 
The dominant idealism of the nation has levied, 
or seemed to levy, a certain tax upon our writ- 
ing. Some instincts, natural to the full-blooded 
utterance of Continental literature, have been 
starved or eliminated here. Very well. The char- 
acteristic American retort to this assertion would 
be: Better our long record and habit of ideal- 
ism than a few masterpieces more or less. As a 

[ 109 ] 



The American Mind 

people, we have cheerfully accepted the Puritan 
restraintof speech, we have respected the shame- 
faced conventions of decentand social utterance. 
Like the men and women described in Locker- 
Lampson's verses, Americans 

** eat, and drink, and scheme, and plod, — 
They go to church on Sunday ; 
And many are afraid of God — 
And more of Mrs. Grundy.*' 

Now Mrs. Grundy is assuredly not the most de- 
sirable of literary divinities, but the student of 
classical literature can easily think of other di- 
vinities, celebrated in exquisite Greek and Ro- 
man verse, who are distinctly less desirable still. 
" Not passion, but sentiment," said Haw- 
thorne, in a familiar passage of criticism of 
his own '^wice-1'old 'Tales. H ow often must the 
student of American literature echo that half- 
melancholy but just verdict, as he surveys the 
transition from the spiritual intensity of a few of 
our earlier writers to the sentimental qualities 
which have brought popular recognition to the 
many. Take the word "soul" itself. Calvinism 
shadowed and darkened the meaning, perhaps, 
and yet its spiritual passion made the word 
"soul " sublime. The reaction against Calvin- 

[ no] 



American Idealism 

ism has made religion more human, natural, 
and possibly more Christlike, but "soul" has 
lost the thrilling solemnity with which Edwards 
pronounced the word. Emerson and Haw- 
thorne, far as they had escaped from the bonds 
of their ancestral religion, still utter the word 
"soul "with awe. But in the popular ser- 
mon and hymn and story of our day, — with 
their search after the sympathetic and the senti- 
mental, after what is called in magazine slang 
"heart-interest," — the word has lost both its 
intellectual distinction and its literary magic. 
It will regain neither until it is pronounced 
once more with spiritual passion. 

But in literature, as in other things, we must 
take what we can get. The great mass of our 
American writing is sentimental, because it has 
been produced by, and for, an excessively senti- 
mental people. The poems in Stedman*s care- 
fully chosen Anthology, the prose and verse 
in the two volume Stedman-Hutchinson col- 
lection of American Literature, the Library of 
Southern Literature, and similar sectional an- 
thologies, the school Readers and Speakers, 
— particularly in the half-century between 
1830 and 1880, — our newspapers and maga- 

[ I" ] 



The American Mind 

zines, — particularly the so-called " yellow " 
newspapers and the illustrated magazines typi- 
fied by Harper s Monthly y — are all fairly drip- 
ping with sentiment. American oratory is noto- 
riously the most sentimental oratory of the 
civilized world. The Congressional Record still 
presents such specimens of sentiment — de- 
livered or given leave to be printed, it is true, 
for "home consumption " rather than to affect 
the course of legislation — as are inexplicable to 
an Englishman or a Frenchman or an Italian. 
Immigrants as we all are, and migratory as 
we have ever been, — so much so that one 
rarely meets an American who was born in 
the house built by his grandfather, — we cling 
with peculiar fondness to the sentiment of 
"Home." The best-known American poem, 
for decades, was Samuel Woodworth^s " Old 
Oaken Bucket," the favorite popular song was 
Stephen Foster's " My Old Kentucky Home," 
the favorite play was Denman Thompson's 
" Old Homestead." Without that appealing 
word "mother "the American melodrama would 
be robbed of its fifth act. Without pictures of 
" the child " the illustrated magazines would go 
into bankruptcy. No country has witnessed 

[ "2] 



American Idealism 

such a production of periodicals and books for 
boys and girls; France and Germany imitate 
in vain l^he ToutFs Companion and St, Nicholas^ 
as they did the stories of" Oliver Optic" and 
Little Women and Little Lord Fauntleroy, 

The sentimental attitude towards women and 
children, which is one of the most typical as- 
pects of American idealism, is constantly illus- 
trated in our short stories. Bret Harte, disci- 
ple of Dickens as he was, and Romantic as was 
his fashion of dressing up his miners and gam- 
blers, was accurately faithful to the American 
feeling towards the "kid" and the "woman." 
" Tennessee's Partner," " The Luck of Roar- 
ing Camp," " Christmas at Sandy Bar," are ob- 
vious examples. Owen Wister's stories are 
equally faithful and admirable in this matter. 
The American girl still does astonishing things 
in international novels, as she has continued 
to do since the eighteen-sixties, but they are 
astonishing mainly to the European eye and 
against the conventionalized European back- 
ground. She does the same things at home, 
and neither she nor her mother sees why she 
should not, so universal among us is the chiv- 
alrous interpretation of actions and situations 

[ "3 ] 



The American Mind 

which amaze the European observer. The pop- 
ular American literature which recognizes and 
encourages this position of the "young girl" 
in our social structure is a literature primarily 
of sentiment. The note of passion — in the Eu- 
ropean sense of that word — jars and shatters 
it. The imported "problem-play," written for 
an adult public in Paris or London, introduces 
social facts and intellectual elements almost 
wholly alien to the experience of American 
matinee audiences. Disillusioned historians of 
our literature have instanced this unsophistica- 
tion as a proof of our national inexperience ; 
yet it is often a sort of radiant and triumphant 
unsophistication which does not lose its inno- 
cence in parting with its ignorance. 

That sentimental idealization of classes, 
whether peasant, bourgeois, or aristocratic, 
which has long been a feature of Continental 
and English poetry and fiction, is practically 
absent from American literature. Whatever the 
future may bring, there have hitherto been no 
fixed classes in American society. Webster was 
guilty of no exaggeration when he declared that 
the whole North was made up of laborers, 
and Lincoln spoke in the same terms in his 

[ "4] 



American Idealism 

well-known sentences about " hired laborers ": 
" twenty-five years ago I was a hired laborer/' 
The relative uniformity of economic and social 
conditions, which prevailed until toward the 
close of the nineteenth century, made, no 
doubt, for the happiness of the greatest num- 
ber, but it failed, naturally, to afford that pic- 
turesqueness of class contrast and to stimulate 
that sentiment of class distinction, in which 
European literature is so rich. 

Very interesting, in the light of contempo- 
rary economic conditions, is the effort made by 
American poets in the middle of the last cent- 
ury to glorify labor. They were not so much 
idealizing a particular laboring class, as en- 
deavoring, in Whitman's words, " To teach the 
average man the glory of his walk and trade/* 
Whitman himself sketched the American work- 
man in almost every attitude which appealed 
to his own sense of the picturesque and heroic. 
But years before Leaves of Grass was published, 
Whittier had celebrated in his Songs of Labor 
the glorified images of lumberman and drover, 
shoemaker and fisherman. Lucy Larcom and 
the authors of 'The Lowell Offering portrayed 
the fine idealism of the young women — of the 

[ 115 ] 



The American Mind 

best American stock — who went enthusiastic- 
ally to work in the cotton-mills of Lowell and 
Lawrence, or who bound shoes by their own 
firesides on the Essex County farms. That glow 
of enthusiasm for labor was chiefly moral, but 
it was poetical as well. The changes which have 
come over the economic and social life of Amer- 
ica are nowhere more sharply indicated than in 
that very valley of the Merrimac where, sixty 
and seventy years ago, one could " hear Amer- 
ica singing." There are few who are singing to- 
day in the cotton-mills; the operators, instead 
of girls from the hill-farms, are Greeks, Lithu- 
anians, Armenians, Italians. Whittier's drovers 
have gone forever; the lumbermen and deep- 
sea fishermen have grown fewer, and the men 
who still swing the axes and haul the frozen 
cod-lines are mostly aliens. The pride that once 
broke into singing has turned harsh and silent. 
" Labor" looms vast upon the future political 
and social horizon, but the songs of labor have 
lost the lyric note. They have turned into the 
dramas and tragedies of labor, as portrayed 
with the swift and fierce insistence of the short 
story, illustrated by the Kodak. In the great 
agricultural sections of the West and South the 

[ "6] 



American Idealism 

old bucolic sentiment still survives, — that sim- 
ple joy of seeing the " frost upon the pumpkin " 
and " the fodder in the stock " which Mr. James 
Whitcomb Riley has sung with such charming 
fidelity to the type. But even on the Western 
farms toil has grown less manual. It is more a 
matter of expert handling of machinery. Reap- 
ing and binding may still have their poet, but 
he needs to be a Kipling rather than a Burns. 

Our literature, then, reveals few traces of 
idealization of a class, and but little idealization 
of trades or callings. Neither class nor calling 
presents anything permanent to the American 
imagination, or stands for anything ultimate in 
American experience. On the other hand, our 
writing is rich in local sentiment and sectional 
loyalty. The short story, which has seized so 
greedily the more dramatic aspects of Amer- 
ican energy, has been equally true to the quiet 
background of rural scenery and familiar ways. 
American idealism, as shown in the transform- 
ation of the lesser loyalties of home and coun- 
tryside into the larger loyalties of state and 
section, and the absorption of these, in turn, 
into the emotions of nationalism, is particularly 
illustrated in our political verse. A striking 

[ 117] 




The American Mind 

example of the imaginative visualization of the 
political units of a state is the spirited roll-call 
of the counties in Whittier's " Massachusetts 
to Virginia." But the burden of that fine poem, 
after all, is the essential unity of Massachusetts 
as a sovereign state, girding herself to repel the 
attack of another sovereign state, Virginia. Now 
the evolution of our political history, both lo- 
cal and national, has tended steadily, for half a 
century, to the obliteration, for purposes of the 
imagination, of county lines within state lines. 
At the last Republican state convention held 
in Massachusetts, there were no county banners 
displayed, for the first time in half a century. 
Many a city-dweller to-day cannot tell in what 
county he is living unless he has happened to 
make a transfer of real estate. State lines them- 
selves are fading away. The federal idea has 
triumphed. Doubtless the majority of the fel- 
low citizens of John Randolph of Roanoke were 
all the more proud of him because the poet 
could say of him, in writing an admiring and 
mournful epitaph: — 

** Beyond Virginia's border line 
His patriotism perished." 

The great collections of Civil War verse, which 

[ "8], 



American Idealism 

are lying almost unread in the libraries, are store- 
houses of this ancient state pride and jealousy, 
which was absorbed so fatally into the larger 
sectional antagonism. " Maryland, my Mary- 
land" gave place to " Dixie," just as Whittier*s 
"Massachusetts to Virginia" was forgotten 
when marching men began to sing "John 
Brown's Body" and "The Battle Hymn of the 
Republic." The literature of sectionalism still 
lingers in its more lovable aspect in the verse 
and fiction which still celebrates the fairer side 
of the civilization of the Old South: its ideals 
of chivalry and local loyalty, its gracious women 
and gallant men. Our literature needs to cul- 
tivate this provincial affection for the past, as an 
offset to the barren uniformity which the fed- 
eral scheme allows. But the ultimate imagina- 
tive victory, like the actual political victory of 
the Civil War, is with the thought and feeling 
of Nationalism. It is foreshadowed in that pas- 
sionate lyric cry of Lowell, which sums up so 
much and, like all true passion, anticipates so 
much : — 

** O Beautiful! my Country!" 
The literary record of American idealism 
thus illustrates how deeply the conception of 

["9] 



/ 



The American Mind 

Nationalism has affected the imagination of 
our countrymen. The literary record of the 
American conception of liberty runs further 
back. Some historians have allowed them- 
selves to think that the American notion of 
liberty is essentially declamatory, a sort of fu- 
tile echo of Patrick Henry's " Give me Liberty 
or give me Death"; and not only declamatory, 
but hopelessly theoretical and abstract. They 
grant that it was a trumpet-note, no doubt, for 
agitators against the Stamp Act, and for pam- 
phleteers like Thomas Paine; that it may have 
been a torch for lighting dark and weary ways 
in the Revolutionary War; but they believe it 
likewise to be a torch which gleams with the 
fire caught from France and which was passed 
back to France in turn when her own great 
bonfire was ready for lighting. The facts, how- 
ever, are inconsistent with this picturesque 
theory of contemporary reactionists. It is true 
that the word " liberty " has been full of tempt- 
ation for generations of American orators, that 
it has become an idol of the forum, and often 
a source of heat rather than of light. But to 
treat American Liberty as if she habitually wore 
the red cap is to nourish a Francophobia as 

[ I20 ] 



American Idealism 

absurd as Edmund Burke's. The sober truth 
is that the American working theory of Lib- 
erty is singularly like St. PauFs. " Ye have been 
called unto liberty; only use not liberty for an 
occasion to the flesh." A few sentences from 
John Winthrop, written in 1645, are signifi- 
cant : " There is a twofold liberty, natural . . . 
and civil or federal. The first is common to 
man with beasts and other creatures. By this, 
man, as he stands in relation to man simply, 
hath liberty to do what he lists; it is a liberty 
to evil as well as to good. This liberty is incom- 
patible and inconsistent with authority. . . . 
The other kind of liberty I call civil or federal, 
itmay also be termed moral. . . . This liberty 
is the proper end and object of authority, and 
cannot subsist without it; and it is a liberty to 
that only which is good, just, and honest. This 
liberty you are to stand for, with the hazard 
(not only of your goods, but) of your lives, if 
need be. . . . This liberty is maintained and 
exercised in a way of subjection to authority; 
it is of the same kind of liberty wherewith 
Christ hath made us free." 

There speaks the governor, the man of affairs, 
the typical citizen of the future republic. The 



The American Mind 

liberty to do as one pleases is a dream of the 
Renaissance; but out of dreamland it does not 
work. Nobody, even in revolutionary France, 
imagines that it will work. Jefferson, who is pop- 
ularly supposed to derive his notion of liberty 
from French theorists, is to all practical pur- 
poses nearer to John Winthrop than he is to 
Rousseau. The splendid phrases of his " Decla- 
ration " are sometimes characterized as abstrac- 
tions. They are really generalizations from past 
political experience. An arbitrary king, assum- 
ing a liberty to do as he liked, had encroached 
upon the long-standing customs and authority 
of the colonists. Jefferson, at the bidding of the 
Continental Congress, served notice of the royal 
trespass, and incidentally produced (as Lincoln 
said) a "standard maxim for free society." 

It is true, no doubt, that the word "liberty " 
became in Jefferson's day, and later, a mere par- 
tisan or national shibboleth, standing for no 
reality, degraded to a catchword, a symbol of 
antagonism to Great Britain. In the political 
debates and the impressive prose and verse of 
the anti-slavery struggle, the word became once 
more charged with vital meaning; it glowed 
under the heat and pressure of an idea. Towards 

[ 122 ] 



American Idealism 

the end of the nineteenth century it went temp- 
orarily out of fashion. The late Colonel Hig- 
ginson, an ideal type of what Europeans call an 
" 1848 " man, attended at the close of the cen- 
tury some sessions of the American Historical 
Association. In his own address, at thq closing 
dinner, he remarked that there was one word for 
which he had listened in vain during the read- 
ing of the papers by the younger men. It was 
the word "liberty.** One of the younger school 
retorted promptly that since we had the thing 
liberty, we had no need to glorify the word. 
But Colonel Higginson, stanch adherent as he 
was of the " good old cause,** was not convinced. 
Like many another lover of American letters, 
he thought that William Vaughn Moody*s 
" Ode in Time of Hesitation ** deserved a place 
by the side of LowelTs " Commemoration 
Ode," and that when the ultimate day of reck- 
oning comes for the whole muddled Imperial- 
istic business, the standard of reckoning must 
be "liberty** as Winthrop and Jefferson and 
Lincoln and Lowell and Vaughn Moody un- 
derstood the word. 

In the mean time we must confess that the 
history of our literature, with a few noble excep- 

[ 123 ] 



The American Mind 

tions, shows a surprising defect in the passion for f^' 
freedom. Tennyson*s famous lines about "Free- 
dom broadening slowly down from precedent 
to precedent " are perfectly American in their 
conservative tone ; while it is Englishmen like 
Byron and Landor and Shelley and Swinburne 
who have written the most magnificent repub- 
lican poetry. The "land of the free" turns to 
the monarchic mother country, after all, for the 
glow and thunder and splendor of the poetry 
of freedom. It is one of the most curious phe- 
nomena in the history of literature. Shall we 
enter the preoccupation plea once more ? En- 
joying the thing liberty, have we been therefore 
less concerned with the idea ? Or is it simply 
another illustration of the defective passion of 
American literature ? 

Yet there is one phase of political loyalty 
which has been cherished by the imagination of 
Americans, and which has inspired noteworthy 
oratory and noble political prose. It is the sent- 
iment of Union. In one sense, of course, this 
dates back to the period of Franklin's Ipon mot 
about our all hanging together, or hanging sep- 
arately. It is found in Hamilton's pamphlets, 
in Paine*s Crisis^ in the Federalist^ in Washing- 

[ 124 ] 



American Idealism 

ton's " Farewell Address." It is peculiarly as- 
sociated with the name and fameof Daniel Web- 
ster, and, to a less degree, with the career of 
Henry Clay. In the stress of the debate over 
slavery, many a Northerner with abolitionist 
convictions, like the majority of Southerners 
with slave-holding convictions, forgot the splen- 
did peroration of Webster's " Reply to Hay ne " 
and were willing to "let the Union go." But 
in the four tragic and heroic years that followed 
the firing upon the American flag at Fort Sum- 
ter the sentiment of Union was made sacred by 
such sacrifices as the patriotic imagination of 
a Clay or a Webster had never dreamed. A new 
literature resulted. A lofty ideal of indisso- 
luble Union was preached in pulpits, pleaded 
for in editorials, sung in lyrics, and woven 
into the web of fiction. Edward Everett Hale's 
Man Without a Country became one of the 
most poignantly moving of American stories. 
In Walt Whitman's Drum-'Taps and his later 
poems, the " Union of these States " became 
transfigured with mystical significance: no long- 
er a mere political compact, dissoluble at will, 
but a spiritual entity, a new incarnation of the 
soul of man. 

[ 125 ] 



The American Mind 

We must deal later with that American in- 
stinct of fellowship which Whitman believed to 
have been finally cemented by the Civil War, 
and which has such import for the future of our 
democracy. There are likewise communal loy- 
alties, glowing with the new idealism which has 
come with the twentieth century : ethical, mun- 
icipal, industrial, and artistic movements which 
are full of promise for the higher life of the coun- 
try, but which have not yet had time to express 
themselves adequately in literature. There are 
stirrings of racial loyalty among this and that 
element of our composite population, — as for 
instance among the gifted younger generation 
of American Jews, — a racial loyalty not an- 
tagonistic to the American current of ideas, but 
rather in full unison with it. Internationalism 
itself furnishes motives for the activity of the 
noblest imaginations, and the true literature of 
internationalism has hardly yet begun. It is in 
the play and counterplay of these new forces 
that the American literature of the twentieth 
century must measure itself. Communal feel- 
ings novel to Americans bred under the ac- 
cepted individualism will doubtless assert them- 
selves in our prose and verse. But it is to be 

[ 126] 



American Idealism 

remembered that the best writing thus far pro- 
duced on American soil has been a result of the 
old conditions : of the old " Reverences '* ; of the 
pioneer training of mind and body; of the slow 
tempering of the American spirit into an obstin- 
ate idealism. We do not know what course the 
ship may take in the future, but 

" We know what Master laid thy keel. 
What Workman wrought thy ribs of steel. 
Who made each mast and sail and rope. 
What anvil rang, what hammers beat. 
In what a forge and what a heat 
Were shaped the anchors of thy hope! ** 



IV 

Romance and Reaction 

The characteristic attitude of the American 
mind, as we have seen, is one of idealism. We 
may now venture to draw a smaller circle with- 
in that larger circle of idealistic impulses, and 
to label the smaller circle "romance/* Here, 
too, as with the word " idealism,'* although we 
are to make abundantuseof literary illustrations 
of national tendencies, we have no need of a se- 
verely technical definition of terms. When we 
say, "Tom is an idealist" and "Lorenzo is a 
romantic fellow," we convey at least one toler- 
ably clear distinction between Tom and Lo- 
renzo. The idealist has a certain characteristic 
habit of mind or inclination of spirit. When 
confronted by experience, he reacts in a certain 
way. In his Individual and social impulses, in 
the travail of his soul, or in his commerce with 
his neighbors and the world, he behaves in a 
moreor less well-defined fashion. The roman- 

[ 128 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

ticist, when confronted by the same objects and 
experiences, exhibits another type of behavior. 
Lorenzo, though he be Tom's brother, is a 
different fellow; he is — in the opinion of his 
friends, at least — a rather more peculiar person, 
a creature of more varying moods, of height- 
ened feelings, of stranger ways. Like Tom, he 
is a person of sentiment, but his sentiment at- 
taches itself, not so much to everyday aspects 
of experience, as to that which is unusual or ter- 
rifying, lovely or far away; he possesses, or would 
like to possess, bodily or spiritual daring. He 
has the adventurous heart. He is of those who 
love to go down to the sea in ships and do busi- 
ness in great waters. Lorenzo the romanticist 
is made of no finer clay than Tom the idealist, 
but his nerves are differently tuned. Your deep- 
sea fisherman, after all, is only a fisherman at bot- 
tom. That is to say, he too is an idealist, but 
he wants to catch different species of fish from 
those which drop into the basket of the lands- 
man. Precisely what he covets, perhaps he does 
not know. I was once foolish enough to ask an 
old Alsatian soldier who was patiently holding 
his rod over a most unpromising canal near 
Strassburg, what kind offish he was fishing for. 

[ 129 ] 



The American Mind 

"All kinds," was his rebuking answer, and I 
took off my hat to the veteran romanticist. 

The words " romance " and " romanticism " 
have been repeated to the ears of our genera- 
tion with wearisome iteration. Not the least of 
the good luck of Wordsworth and Coleridge lay- 
in the fact that they scarcely knew that they 
were "romanticists." Middle-aged readers of 
the present day may congratulate themselves 
that in their youth they read Wordsworth and 
Coleridge simply because it was Wordsworth 
and Coleridge and not documents illustrating 
the history of the romantic movement. But the 
rising generation is sophisticated. For better or 
worse it has been taught to distinguish between 
the word " romance " on the one side, and the 
word "romanticism "on the other. "Romantic" 
is a useful but overworked adjective which 
attaches itself indiscriminately to both "rom- 
ance" and "romanticism." Professor Vaughan, 
for example, and a hundred other writers, have 
pointed out that in the narrower and more usual 
sense, the words "romance " and " romanticism " 
point to a love of vivid coloring and strongly 
marked contrasts ; to a craving for the unfamiliar, 
the marvellous, and the supernatural. In the 

[ 130 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

widerand less definite sense, they signify a revolt 
from the purely intellectual view of man's na- 
ture; a recognition of the instincts and the pas- 
sions, a vague intimation of sympathy between 
man and the world around him, — in one word, 
the sense of mystery. The narrower and the 
broader meanings pass into one another by im- 
perceptible shades. They are affected by the 
well-known historic conditions for romantic 
feeling in the different European countries. The 
common factor, of course, is the man with the 
romantic world set in his heart. It is Gautier 
with his love of color, Victor Hugo enraptured 
with the sound of words, Heine with his self- 
destroying romantic irony, Novalis with his 
blue flower, and Maeterlinck with K\^ Blue Bird. 
But these romantic men of letters, writing 
in epochs of romanticism, are by no means 
the only children of romance. Sir Humphrey 
Gilbert and Sir Walter Raleigh were as truly 
followers of " the gleam" as were Spenser or 
Marlowe. The spirit of romance is found wher- 
ever and whenever men say to themselves, as 
Don Quixote's niece said of her uncle, that 
" they wish better bread than is made of wheat," 
or when they look within their own hearts, and 

[131 ] 



The American Mind 

assert, as the poet Young said in 1759, long 
before the English romantic movement had 
begun, "there is more in the spirit of man than 
mere prose-reason can fathom." 

We are familiar, perhaps too remorsefully 
familiar, with the fact that romance is likely to 
run a certain course in the individual and then 
to disappear. Looking back upon it afterward, 
it resembles the upward and downward zigzag 
of a fever chart. It has in fact often been de- 
scribed as a measles, a disease of which no one 
can be particularly proud, although he may 
have no reason to blush for it. Southey said 
that he was no more ashamed of having been 
a republican than of having been a boy. Well, 
people catch Byronism, and get over it, much 
as Southey got over his republicanism. In fact 
Byron himself lived long enough — though 
he died at thirty-six — to outgrow his purely 
"Byronic" phase, and to smile at it as know- 
ingly as we do. Coleridge's blossoming period 
as a romantic poet was tragically brief. Keats 
and Shelley had the good fortune to die in the 
fulness of their romantic glory. They did not 
outlive their own poetic sense of the wonder 
and mystery of the world. Yet many an old 

[ 132 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

poet like Tennyson and Browning has pre- 
served his romance to the end. Tennyson dies 
at eighty-three with the full moonlight stream- 
ing through the oriel window upon his bed, 
and with his fingers clasping Shakespeare's 
Cymbeline, 

With most of us commonplace persons, how- 
ever, a reaction from the romantic is almost 
inevitable. The romantic temperament cannot 
long keep the pitch. Poe could indeed do it, 
although he hovered at times near the border 
of insanity. Hawthorne went for relief to his 
profane sea-captains and the carnal-minded su- 
perannuated employees of the Salem Custom 
House. " The weary weight of all this unin- 
telligible world " presses too hard on most of 
those who stop to think about it. The sim- 
plest way of relief is to shrug one's shoulders 
and let the weight go. That is to say, we cease 
being poets, we are no longer the children of 
romance, although we may remain idealists. 
Perhaps it is external events that change, rather 
than we ourselves. The restoration of the Bour- 
bons, the Revolutions of 1830 and 1848, make 
and unmake romantics. Often society catches 
up with the romanticist ; he is no longer a 



The American Mind 

soldier of revolt; he has become a " respectable." 
Or, while remaining a poet, he shifts his atten- 
tion to some more familiar segment of the ideal- 
istic circle. He sings about his wife instead of 
the wife of somebody else. Like Wordsworth, 
he takes for his theme a Mary Hutchinson in- 
stead of the unknown and hauntingly alluring 
figure of Lucy. To put it differently, the high 
light, the mysterious color of dawn or sunset 
disappears from his picture of human life. Or, 
the high light may be diffused in a more tran- 
quil radiance over the whole surface of experi- 
ence. Such an artist may remain a true painter 
or poet, but he is not a romantic poet or painter 
any longer. He has, like the aging Emerson, 
taken in sail ; the god Terminus has said to him, 
" no more." 

One must of course admit that the typical 
romanticist has often been characterized by cer- 
tain intellectual and moral weaknesses. But the 
great romance men, like Edmund Spenser, for 
example, may not possess these weaknesses at 
all. Robert Louis Stevenson was passionately 
in love with the romantic in life and with ro- 
manticism in literature; but it did not make him 
eccentric, weak, or empty. His instinct for en- 

[ 134] 



Romance and Reaction 

during romance was so admirably fine that it 
brought strength to the sinews of his mind, 
light and air and fire to his soul. Among the 
writers of our own day, it is Mr. Kipling who 
has written some of the keenest satire upon 
romantic foibles, while never ceasing to salute 
his real mistress, the true romance. 

«* Who wast, or yet the Lights were set, 
A whisper in the void. 
Who shalt be sung through planets young 
When this is clean destroyed." 

What are the causes of American romance, 
the circumstances and qualities that have pro- 
duced the romantic element in American life 
and character ? Precisely as with the individ- 
ual artist or man of letters, we touch first of all 
upon certain temperamental inclinations. It is 
a question again of the national mind, of the 
differentiation of the race under new climatic 
and physical conditions. We have to reckon 
with the headiness and excitability of youth. 
It was young men who emigrated hither, just as 
in the eighteen-sixties it was young men who 
filled the Northern and the Southern armies. 
The first generations of American immigration 
were made up chiefly of vigorous, imaginative, 

[ 135] 



The American Mind 

and daring youth. The incapables came later. 
It is, I think, safe to assert that the colonists 
of English stock, even as late as 1790, — when 
more than ninety per cent of the population 
of America had in their veins the blood of the 
British Isles, — were more responsive to ro- 
mantic impulses than their English cousins. 
For that matter, an Irishman or a Welshman is 
more romantic than an Englishman to-day. 

From the very beginning of the American 
settlements, likewise, there were evidences of the 
weaker, the over-excitable side of the romantic 
temper. There were volatile men like Morton 
of Merrymount ; there were queer women like 
Anne Hutchinson, admirable woman as she 
was; among the wives of the colonists there 
were plenty of Emily Dickinsons in the germ. 
Among the men, there were schemes that came 
to nothing. There were prototypes of Colonel 
Sellers; a temperamental tendency toward that 
recklessness and extravagance which later his- 
torical conditions stimulated and confirmed. 
The more completely one studies the history 
of our forefathers on American soil, the more 
deeply does one become conscious of the pre- 
vailing atmosphere of emotionalism. 

C 136 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

Furthermore, as one examines the historic 
conditions under which the spirit of American 
romance has been preserved and heightened 
from time to time, one becomes aware that al- 
though ours is rather a romance of wonder than 
of beauty, the spirit of beauty is also to be found. 
The first fervors of the romance of discovery 
were childlike in their eagerness. Hakluyt's 
Voyages, John Smith's 'True Relation ofFirginiay 
Thomas Morton's New England's Canaan, all 
appeal to the sense of the marvellous. 

Listen to Morton's description of Cape Ann. 
I can never read it without thinking of Botti- 
celli's picture of Spring, so naively does this 
picturesque rascal suffuse his landscape with the 
feeling for beauty : — 

" In the Moneth of June, Anno Salutis 1 622, 
it was my chaunce to arrive in the parts of New 
England with 30. Servants, and provision of 
all sorts fit for a plantation: and whiles our 
howses were building, I did indeavour to take 
a survey of the Country : The more I looked, 
the more I liked it. And when I had more seri- 
ously considered of the bewty of the place, with 
all her faire indowments, I did not thinke that 
in all the knowne world it could be paralel'd, 

[ 137 ] . 



The American Mind 

for so many goodly groves of trees, dainty fine 
round rising hillucks, delicate faire large plaines, 
sweete cristall fountaines, and cleare running 
streames that twine in fine meanders through 
the meads, making so sweete a murmering noise 
to heare as would even lull the sences with de- 
light a sleepe, so pleasantly doe they glide upon 
the pebble stones, jetting most jocundly where 
they doe meete and hand in hand runne downe 
to Neptunes Court, to pay the yearely tribute 
which they owe to him as soveraigne Lord of all 
the springs. Contained within the volume of 
the Land, Fowles in abundance. Fish in mul- 
titude; and discovered, besides. Millions of 
Turtledoves on thegreene boughes, which sate 
pecking of the full ripe pleasant grapes that were 
supported by the lusty trees, whose fruitful 
loade did cause the armes to bend : while here 
and there dispersed, you might see Lillies and 
the Daphnean-tree : which made the Land to 
mee seeme paradice : for in mine eie t'was Na- 
tures Masterpeece ; Her cheifest Magazine of 
all where lives her store : if this Land be not 
rich, then is the whole world poore." 

This is the Morton who, a few years later, 
settled at Merrymount. Let me condense the 

[ 138 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

story of his settlement, from the narrative of 
the stout-hearted Governor William Bradford's 
History of Plymouth Plantation : — 

"And Morton became lord of misrule, and 
maintained (as it were) a schoole of Athisme. 
And after they had gott some good into their 
hands, and gott much by trading with the Inde- 
ans, they spent it as vainly, in quaffing & drink- 
ing both wine & strong waters in great exsess, 
and, as some reported lo^* worth in a morning. 
They allso set up a May-pole, drinking and 
dancing aboute it many days togeather, inviting 
the Indean women, for their consorts, dancing 
and frisking togither, (like so many fairies, or 
furies rather,) and worse practises. As if they 
had anew revived & celebrated the feasts of the 
Roman Goddes Flora, or the beasly practieses 
of the madd Bacchinalians. Morton likewise 
(to shew his poetrie) composed sundry rimes 
& verses, some tending to lasciviousnes, and 
others to the detraction & scandall of some per- 
sons, which he affixed to this idle or idoll May- 
poUe. They chainged allso the name of their 
place, and in stead of calling it Mounte Wol- 
laston, they call it Merie-mounte, as if this 
joylity would have lasted ever." 

[ 139 ] 



The American Mind 

But it did not last long. Bradford and other 
leaders of the plantations " agreed by mutual 
consent *' to " suppress Morton and his con- 
sorts." " In a friendly and neighborly way " 
they admonished him. " Insolently he per- 
sisted." " Upon which they saw there was no 
way but to take him by force." " So they mu- 
tually resolved to proceed," and sent Captain 
Standish to summon him to yield. But, says 
Bradford, Morton and some of his crew came 
out, not to yield, but to shoot; all of them 
rather drunk ; Morton himself, with a carbine 
almost half filled with powder and shot, had 
thought to have shot Captain Standish, " hut he 
stepped to him and put by his piece and took him'' 

It is not too fanciful to say that with those 
stern words of Governor Bradford the English 
Renaissance came to an end. The dream of a 
lawless liberty which has been dreamed and 
dreamed out so many times in the history of 
the world was over, for many a day. It was 
only a hundred years earlier that Rabelais had 
written over the doors of his ideal abbey, the 
motto " Do what thou wilt." It is true that 
Rabelais proposed to admit to his Abbey of 
Theleme only such men and women as were 

[ HO ] 



Romance and Reaction 

virtuously inclined. We do not know how 
many persons would have been able and willing 
to go into residence there. At any rate, two 
hundred years went by in New England after 
the fall of Morton before any notable spirit 
dared to cherish once more the old Renaissance 
ideal. At last, in Emerson's doctrine that all 
things are lawful because Nature is good and 
human nature is divine, we have a curious par- 
allel to the doctrine of Rabelais. It was the 
old romance of human will under a new form 
and voiced in new accents. Yet in due time the 
hard facts of human nature reasserted them- 
selves and put this romantic transcendentalism 
by, even as the implacable Myles Standish put 
by that heavily loaded fowling-piece of the 
drunken Morton. 

But men believed in miracles in the first cen- 
tury of colonization, and they will continue at 
intervals to believe in them until human nature 
is no more. The marvellous happenings re- 
corded in Cotton Mather's Magnalia no longer 
excite us to any " suspension of disbelief." 
We doubt the story of Pocahontas. The fresh 
romantic enthusiasm of a settler like Creve- 
coeur seems curiously juvenile to-day, as does 

[ HI ] 



The American Mind 

the romantic curiosity of Chateaubriand con- 
cerning the Mississippi and the Choctaws, or 
the zeal of Wordsworth and Coleridge over 
their dream of a " panti-Socratic " community 
in the unknown valley of the musically-sound- 
ing Susquehanna. Inexperience is a perpetual 
feeder of the springs of romance. John Wesley, 
it will be remembered, went out to the colony 
of Georgia full of enthusiasm for converting 
the Indians ; but as he naively remarks In his 
Journal^ he " neither found or heard of any In- 
dians on the continent of America, who had the 
least desire of being instructed.*' The sense of 
fact, in other words, supervenes, and the glory 
disappears from the face of romance. The hu- 
mor of Mark Twain's Innocents Abroad turns 
largely upon this sense of remorseless fact con- 
fronting romantic Inexperience. 

American history, however, has been marked 
by certain great romantic passions that seem 
endowed with indestructible vitality. The ro- 
mance of discovery, the fascination of the for- 
est and sea, the sense of danger and mystery 
once aroused by the very word "redskin," have 
all moulded and will continue to mould the 
national imagination. How completely the 

[ H2 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

romance of discovery may be fused with the 
glow of humanitarian and religious enthusiasm 
has been shown once for all in the brilliant 
pages of Parkman's story of the Jesuit missions 
in Canada. Pictorial romance can scarcely go 
further than this. In the crisis of Chateau- 
briand's picturesque and passionate tale of the 
American wilderness, no one can escape the 
thrilling, haunting sound of the bell from the 
Jesuit chapel, as it tolls in the night and storm 
that were fatal to the happiness of Atala. One 
scarcely need say that the romance of missions 
has never faded from the American mind. I 
have known a sober New England deacon aged 
eighty-five, who disliked to die because he 
thought he should miss the monthly excite- 
ment of reading the Missionary Herald. The 
deacon's eyes, like the eyes of many an old sea- 
captain in Salem or Newburyport, were liter- 
ally upon the ends of the earth. No one can 
reckon how many starved souls, deprived of 
normal outlet for human feehng, have found 
in this passionate curiosity and concern for the 
souls of black and yellow men and women in 
the antipodes, a constant source of beneficent 
excitement. 

[ 143 ] 



The American Mind 

Nor is there any diminution of interest in the 
mere romance of adventure, in the stories of 
hunter and trapper, the journals of Lewis and 
Clarke, the narratives of Boone and Crockett. 
In writing his superb romances of the North- 
ern Lakes, the prairie and the sea, Fenimorc 
Cooper had merely to bring to an artistic focus 
sentiments that lay deep in the souls of the 
great mass of his American readers. Students 
of our social life have pointed out again and 
again how deeply our national temperament 
has been affected by the existence, during 
nearly three hundred years, of an alien aborig- 
inal race forever lurking upon the borders of 
our civilization. " Playing Indian '* has been 
immensely significant, not merely in stimulat- 
ing the outdoor activity of generations of 
American boys, but in teaching them the per- 
ennial importance of certain pioneer qualities 
of observation, resourcefulness, courage, and 
endurance which date from the time when the 
Indians were a daily and nightly menace. Even 
when the Indian has been succeeded by the 
cowboy, the spirit of romance still lingers, — 
as any collection of cowboy ballads will abun- 
dantly prove. And when the cowboys pass, 

[ H4 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

and the real-estate dealers take possession of 
the field, one is tempted to say that romance 
flourishes more than ever. 

In short, things are what we make them at 
the moment, what we believe them to be. In 
my grandfather's youth the West was in the 
neighborhood of Port Byron, New York, and 
when he journeyed thither from Massachu- 
setts in the eighteen-twenties, the glory of ad- 
venture enfolded him as completely as the boys 
of the preceding generation had been glorified 
in the War of the Revolution, or the boys of 
the next generation when they went gold-seek- 
ing in California in 1849. ^^^ West, in short, 
means simply the retreating horizon, the beck- 
oning finger of opportunity. Like Boston, it 
has been not a place, but a "state of mind." 

<* We must go, go, go away from here. 

On the other side the world we're overdue.'* 

That is the song which sings itself forever 
in the heart of youth. Champlain and Cartier 
heard it in the sixteenth century, Bradford no 
less than Morton in the seventeenth. Some 
Eldorado has always been calling to the more 
adventurous spirits upon American soil. The 

[ 145] 



The American Mind 

passion of the forty-niner neither began nor 
ended with the discovery of gold in California. 
It is within us. It transmutes the harsh or 
drab-colored everyday routine into tissue of 
fairyland. It makes our " winning of the 
West " a magnificent national epic. It changes 
to-day the black belt of Texas, or the wheat- 
fields of Dakota, into pots of gold that lie at 
the end of rainbows, only that the pot of gold 
is actually there. The human hunger of it all, 
the gorgeous dream-like quality of it all, the 
boundlessness of the vast American spaces, the 
sense of forest and prairie and sky, are all in- 
explicably blended with our notion of the ideal 
America. Henry James once tried to explain 
the diflTerence between Turgenieff and a typical 
French novelist by saying that the back door 
of the Russian's imagination was always open 
upon the endless Russian steppe. No one can 
understand the spirit of American romance if 
he is not conscious of this ever-present hinter- 
land in which our spirits have, from the begin- 
ning, taken refuge and found solace. 

We have already noticed, in the chapter on 
idealism, how swiftly the American imagina- 
tion modifies the prosaic facts of everyday 

[ 146] 



Romance and Reaction 

experience. The Idealistic glamour which falls 
upon the day's work changes easily, in the 
more emotional temperaments, and at times, 
indeed, in all of us, into the fervor of true ro- 
mance. Then, the prosaic buying and selling 
becomes the " game.'* A combination of buy- 
ers and sellers becomes the " system." The 
place where these buyers and sellers most do 
congregate and concentrate becomes " Wall 
Street " — a sort of anthropomorphic monster 
which seems to buy and sell the bodies and souls 
of men. Seen half a continent away, through the 
mists of ignorance and prejudice and partisan 
passion, " Wall Street " has loomed like some 
vast Gibraltar. To the broker*s clerk who earns 
his weekly salary in that street, the Nebraska 
notion of " Wall Street " is too grotesque for 
discussion. 

How easily every phase of American busi- 
ness life may take on the hues of romance is 
illustrated by the history of our railroads. No 
wonder that Bret Harte wrote a poem about 
the meeting of the eastward and westward fac- 
ing engines when the two sections of the Union 
Pacific Railroad at last drew near each other 
on the interminable plains and the two engines 

[ H7 ] 



The American Mind 

could talk. Of course what they said was 
poetry. There was a time when even the Erie 
Canal was poetic. The Panama Canal to-day, in 
the eyes of most Americans, is something other 
than a mere feat of engineering. We are doing 
more than making " the dirt fly." The canal 
represents victory over hostile forces, conquest 
of unwilling Nature, achievement of what had 
long been deemed impossible, the making not 
of a ditch, but of History. 

So with all that American zest for camping, 
fishing, sailing, racing, which lies deep in the 
Anglo-Saxon, and which succeeds to the more 
primitive era of actual struggle against savage 
beasts or treacherous men or mysterious for- 
ests. It is at once an outlet and a nursery for 
romantic emotion. The out-of-doors move- 
ment which began with Thoreau's hut on Wal- 
den Pond, and which has gone on broadening 
and deepening to this hour, implies far more 
than mere variation from routine. It furnishes, 
indeed, a healthful escape from the terrific pres- 
sure of modern social and commercial exigen- 
cies. Yet its more important function is to pro- 
vide for grown-ups a chance to " play Indian " 
too. 

C 148 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

But outdoors and indoors, after all, lie in the 
heart and mind, rather than in the realm of 
actual experience. The romantic imagination 
insists upon taking its holiday, whether the 
man who possesses it gets his holiday or not. 
I have never known a more truly romantic 
figure than a certain tin-pedler in Connecticut 
who, in response to the question, " Do you do 
a good business ? '* made this perfectly Steven- 
sonian reply: "Well, I make a living selling 
crockery and tinware, but my business is the 
propagation of truth.*' 

This wandering idealist may serve to remind 
us again of the difference between romance and 
romanticism. The true romance is of the spirit. 
Romanticism shifts and changes with external 
fortunes, with altering emotions, with the alter- 
nate play of light and shade over the vast land- 
scape of human experience. The typical ro- 
manticist, as we have seen, is a man of moods. 
It is only a Poewhocan keep the pitch through 
the whole concert of experience. But the deeper 
romance ofthe spirit is oblivious of these changes 
of external fortune, this rising or falling of 
the emotional temperature. The moral life of 
America furnishes striking illustrations of the 

[ 149 ] 



The American Mind 

steadfastness with which certain moral causes 
have been kept, as it were, in the focus of in- 
tense feeling. Poetry, undefeated and unwa- 
vering poetry, has transfigured such practical 
propaganda as the abolition of slavery, the 
emancipation of woman, the fight against the 
liquor traffic, the emancipation of the individual 
from the clutches of economic and commercial 
despotism. Men like Colonel Thomas Went- 
worth Higginson, women like Julia Ward 
Howe, fought for these causes throughout their 
lives. Colonel Higginson's attitude towards 
women was not merely chivalric (for one may 
be chivalrous without any marked predisposi- 
tion to romance), but nobly romantic also. 
James Russell Lowell, poet as he was, outlived 
that particular phase of romantic moral reform 
which he had been taught by Maria White. But 
in other men and women bred in that old New 
England of the eighteen-forties, the moral fer- 
vor knew no restraint. Garrison, although in 
many respects a most unromantic personality, 
was engaged in a task which gave him all the 
inspiration of romance. A romantic "atmo- 
sphere,'* fully as highly colored as any of the 
romantic atmospheres that we are accustomed 

[ 150] 



Romance and Reaction 

to mark in literature, surrounded as with a 
luminous mist the figures of the New England 
transcendentalists. They, too, as Heine said of 
himself, were soldiers. They felt themselves 
enlisted for a long but ultimately victorious 
campaign. They were willing to pardon, in 
their comrades and in themselves, those im- 
aginative excesses which resemble the physical 
excesses of a soldier's camp. Transcendentalism 
was thus a militant philosophy and religion, 
with both a destructively critical and a posi- 
tively constructive creed. Channing, Parker, 
Alcott, Margaret Fuller, were warrior-priests, 
poets and prophets of a gallant campaign 
against inherited darkness and bigotry, and for 
the light. 

The atmosphere of that score of years in 
New England was now superheated, now 
rarefied, thin, and cold; but it was never 
quite the normal atmosphere of every day. On 
the purely literary side, it is needless to say, 
these men and women sought inspiration in 
Coleridge and Carlyle and other English and 
German romanticists. In fact, the most endur- 
ing literature of New England between 1830 
and 1865 was distinctly a romantic literature, 

[ 151 ] 



The American Mind 

It was rooted, however, not so much in those 
swift changes of historic condition, those start- 
ling liberations of the human spirit which gave 
inspiration to the romanticism of the Conti- 
nent, as it was in the deep and vital fervor with 
which these New Englanders envisaged the 
problems of the moral life. 

Other illustrations of the American capacity 
for romance lie equally close at hand. Take, for 
instance, the stout volume in which Mr. Bur- 
ton Stevenson has collected the Poems of Ameri- 
can History, Here are nearly seven hundred 
pages of closely printed patriotic verse. While 
Stedman's Anthology reveals no doubt national 
aspirations and national sentiment, as well as 
the emotional fervor of individuals, Mr. Stev- 
enson's collection has the advantage of focus- 
sing this national feeling upon specific events. 
Stedman*s Anthology is an enduring document 
of American idealism, touching in the sincerity 
of its poetic moods, pathetic in its long lists 
of men and women who are known by one 
poem only, or who have never, for one reason 
or another, fulfilled their poetic promise. The 
thousand poems which it contains are more 
striking, in fact, for their promise than for their 

[ 152 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

performance. They are intimations of what 
American men and women would have liked 
to do or to be. In this sense, it is a precious 
volume, but it is certainly not commensurate, 
either in passion or in artistic perfection, with 
the forces of that American life which it tries 
to interpret. Indeed, Mr. Stedman, after fin- 
ishing his task of compilation, remarked to 
more than one of his friends that what this 
country needed was some " adult male verse." 
The Poems of American History collected by 
Mr. Stevenson are at least vigorous and con- 
crete. One aspect of our history which espe- 
cially lends itself to Mr. Stevenson's purpose 
is the romance which attaches itself to war. It 
is scarcely necessary to say nowadays that all 
wars, even the noblest, have had their sordid, 
grimy, selfish, bestial aspect ; and that the intel- 
ligence and conscience of our modern world 
are more and more engaged m the task of mak- 
ing future wars impossible. But the slightest 
acquaintance] with American history reveals 
the immense reservoir of romantic emotion 
which has been drawn upon in our national 
struggles. War, of course, is an immemorial 
source of romantic feeling. William James's 

[ 153] 



The American Mind 

notable essay on " A Moral Substitute for 
War " endeavored to prove that our modern 
economic and social life, if properly organized, 
would give abundant outlet and satisfaction to 
those romantic impulses which formerly found 
their sole gratification in battle. Many of us 
believe that he was right ; but for the moment 
we must look backward and not forward. We 
must remember the stern if rude poetry in- 
spired by our Revolutionary struggle, the ro- 
mantic halo that falls upon the youthful figure 
of Nathan Hale, the baleful light that touches 
the pale face of Benedict Arnold, the romance 
of the Bennington fight to the followers of 
Stark and Ethan Allen, the serene voice of 
the "little captain," John Paul Jones: — "We 
have not struck, we have just begun our part 
of the fighting." The colors of romance still 
drape the Chesapeake and the Shannon, Te- 
cumseh and Tippecanoe. The hunters of Ken- 
tucky, the explorers of the Yellowstone and the 
Columbia, the emigrants who left their bones 
along the old Santa Fe Trail, are our Homeric 
men. 

The Mexican War affords pertinent illustra- 
tion, not only of romance, but of reaction. The 

[ 154 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

earlier phases of the Texan struggle for Inde- 
pendence have much of the daring, the splendid 
rashness, the glorious and tragic catastrophes 
of the great romantic adventures of the Old 
World. It is not the Texans only who still 
"remember the Alamo," but when those bril- 
liant and dramatic adventures of border war- 
fare became drawn into the larger struggle for 
the extension of slavery, the poetic reaction be- 
gan. The physical and moral pretence of war- 
fare, the cheap splendors of epaulets and feath- 
ers, shrivelled at the single touch of the satire 
of the Biglow Papers, Lowell, writing at that 
moment with the instinct and fervor of a pro- 
phet, brought the whole vainglorious business 
back to the simple issue of right and wrong: 

** 'Taint your eppyletts an' feathers 

Make the thing a grain more right ; 
'Taint afollerin' your bell-wethers 

Will excuse ye in His sight ; 
Ef you take a sword an' dror it. 

An' go stick a feller thru, 
Guv'ment aint to answer for it, 

God' 11 send the bill to you." 

But far more interesting is the revelation of 
the American capacity for romance whic}^ was 

[ 155 ] 



The American Mind 

made possible by the war between the States. 
Stevenson's Poems of American History and 
Stedman's Anthology give abundant illustration 
of almost every aspect of that epical struggle. 
The South was in a romantic mood from the 
very beginning. The North drifted into it after 
Sumter. I have already said that no one can 
examine a collection of Civil War verse with- 
out being profoundly moved by its evidence 
of American idealism. I n specific phases of the 
struggle, in connection with certain battle-fields 
and certain leaders of both North and South, 
this idealism is heightened into pure romance, 
so that even our novelists feel that they can 
give no adequate picture of the war without 
using the colors of poetry. Most critics, no 
doubt, agree in feeling that we are still too 
near to that epoch-making crisis of our national 
existence to do it any justice in the terms of 
literature. Perhaps we must wait for the per- 
fected romance of the years 1861-65, until the 
men and the events of that struggle are as 
remote as the heroes of Greece and Troy. Cer- 
tainly no one can pass a final judgment upon 
the verse occasioned by recent struggles in 
arms. Any one who has studied the English 



Romance and Reaction 

poetry inspired by the South- African War will 
be painfully conscious of the emotional and 
moral complexity of all such issues, of the bit- 
ter injustice which poets, as well as other men, 
render to one another, of the impossibility of 
transmuting into the pure gold of romance the 
emotions originating in the stock market, in 
race-hatred, and in national vainglory. 

We have lingered too long, perhaps, over 
these various evidences of the romantic tem- 
per of America. We must now glance at the 
forces of reaction, the recoil to fact. What 
is it which contradicts, inhibits, or negatives 
the romantic tendency ? Among other forces, 
there is certainly humor. Humor and romance 
often go hand in hand, but humor is commonly 
fatal to romanticism. There is satire, which re- 
bukes both romanticism and romance, which 
exposes the fallacies of the one, and punctures 
the exuberance of the other. More effective, 
perhaps, than either humor or satire as an an- 
tiseptic against romance, is the overmastering 
sense of fact. This is what Emerson called the 
instinct for the milk in the pan, an instinct 
which Emerson himself possessed extraordi- 
narily on his purely Yankee side, and which a 

[ 157] 



The American Mind ' 

pioneer country is forced continually to develop 
and to recognize. Camping, for instance, de- 
velops both the romantic sense and the fact 
sense. Supper must be cooked, even at Wal- 
den Pond. There must be hewers of wood and 
drawers of water, and the dishes ought to be 
washed. 

On a higher plane, also, than this mere 
sense of physical necessity, there are forces 
limiting the influence of romance. Schiller put 
it all into one famous line: — 

<* Und was uns alle bandigt, das Gemeine.** 

Or listen to Keats : — 

" 'T is best to remain aloof from people, and 
like their good parts, without being eternally 
troubled with the dull process of their every- 
day lives. . . . All I can say is that standing at 
Charing Cross, and looking East, West, North 
and South, I can see nothing but dullness." 

And Henry James, describing New York in 
his book, ne American Scene^ speaks of "the 
overwhelming preponderance of the unmiti- 
gated ' business-man * face . . . the consum- 
mate monotonous commonness of the pushing 
male crowd, moving in its dense mass — with 

[ 158] 



Romance and Reaction 

the confusion carried to chaos for any intelli- 
gence, any perception; a welter of objects and 
sounds in which relief, detachment, dignity, 
meaning, perished utterly and lost all rights 
. . . the universal will to move — to move, 
move, move, as an end in itself, an appetite at 
any price." 

One need not be a poet like Keats or an in- 
veterate psychologist like Henry James, in or- 
der to become aware how the commonplaceness 
of the world rests like a fog upon the mind and 
heart. No one goes to his day*s work and 
comes home again without a consciousness of 
contact with an unspiritual atmosphere, or in- 
completely spiritualized forces, not merely with 
indifference, to what Emerson would term 
" the over-soul," but with a lack of any faith 
in the things which are unseen. Take those 
very forces which have limited the influence of 
Emerson throughout the United States ; they 
illustrate the universal forces which clip the 
wings of romance. The obstacles in the path 
of Emerson's influence are not merely the re- 
ligious and denominational diflferences which 
Dr. George A. Gordon portrayed in a notable 
article at the time of the Emerson Centenary. 

[ 159] 



The American Mind 

The real obstacles are more serious. It is true 
that Dr. Park of Andover, Dr. Bushnell of 
Hartford, and Dr. Hodge of Princeton, could 
say in Emerson's lifetime : " We know a bet- 
ter, a more Scriptural and certificated road to- 
ward the very things which Emerson is seeking 
for. We do not grant that we are less idealistic 
than he. We think him a dangerous guide, fol- 
lowing wandering fires. It is better to journey 
safely with us.*' 

But I have known at least two livery-stable 
keepers and many college professors who would 
unite in saying: " Hodge and Park and Bush- 
nell and Emerson are all following after some- 
thing that does not exist. One is not much 
more mistaken than the others. We can get 
along perfectly well in our business without any 
of those ideas at all. Let us stick to the milk 
in the pan, the horse in the stall, the documents 
which you will find in the library." 

There exists, in other words, in all classes 
of American society to-day ,just as there existed 
during the Revolution, during the transcenden- 
tal movement, or the Civil War, an immense 
mass of unspiritualized, unvitalized Ameri- 
can manhood and womanhood. No literature 

[ i6o] 



Romance and Reaction 

comes from it and no religion, though there is 
much human kindness, much material progress, 
and some indestructible residuum of that ideal- 
ism which lifts man above the brute. 

Yet the curious and the endlessly fascinating 
thing about these forces of reaction is that they 
themselves shift and change. We have seen 
that external romance depending upon strange- 
ness of scene, novelty of adventure, rich atmo- 
spheric distance of space or time, disappears 
with the changes of civilization. The farm ex- 
pands over the wolf's den, the Indian becomes 
a blacksmith, but do the gross and material 
instincts ultimately triumph ? He would be a 
hardy prophet who should venture to assert it. 
We must reckon always with the swing of the 
human pendulum, with the reaction against re- 
action. Here, for example, during the last de- 
cade, has been book after book written about 
the reaction against democracy. All over the 
world,it is asserted, there are unmistakable signs 
that democracy will not practically work in the 
face of the modern tasks to which the world 
has set itself. One reads these books, one per- 
suades himself that the hour for democracy is 
passing, and then one goes out on the street 

[ i6i ] 



The American Mind 

and buys a morning newspaper and discovers 
that democracy has scored again. So is it with 
the experience of the individual. You may 
fancy that the romance of the seas passes, for 
you, with the passing of the square-sailed ship. 
If Mr. Kipling's poetry cannot rouse you from 
that mood of reaction, walk down to the end 
of the pier to-morrow and watch the ocean 
liner come up the harbor. If there is no ro- 
mance there, you do not know romance when 
you see it ! 

Take the case of the farmer; his prosaic life 
is the butt of the newspaper paragraphers from 
one end of the country to the other. But does 
romance disappear from the farm with machin- 
ery and scientific agriculture ? There are far- 
mers who follow Luther Burbank's experi- 
ments with plants, with all the fascination 
which used to attach to alchemy and astrology. 
The farmer has no longer Indians to fight or 
a wilderness to subdue, but the soils of his 
farm are analyzed at his state university by 
men who live in the daily atmosphere of the 
romance of science, and who say, as a profes- 
sor in the University of Chicago said once, 
that "a flower is so wonderful that if you knew 

[ 162 ] 



Romance and Reaction 

what was going on within its cell-structure, 
you would be afraid to stay alone with it in 
the dark." 

The reaction from romance, therefore, real 
as it is, and dead weight as it lies upon the 
soul of the nation, often breeds the very forces 
which destroy it. In other words, the reaction 
against one type of romance produces inevita- 
bly another type of romance, other aspects of 
wonder, terror, and beauty. Following the ro- 
mance of ad venture comes, after never so deep 
a trough in the sea, the romance of science, like 
the crest of another wave ; and then comes what 
we call, for lack of a better word, the psycho- 
logical romance, the old mystery and strange- 
ness of the human soul, iEschylus and Job, as 
Victor Hugo says, in the poor crawfish gatherer 
on the rocks of Brittany. 

We must remember that we are endeavoring 
to measure great spaces and to take account 
of the " amplitude of time." The individual 
"fact-man," as Coleridge called him, remains 
perhaps a fact-man to the end, just as the 
dreamer may remain a dreamer. But no single 
generation is compounded all of fact or all of 
dream. Longfellow felt, no doubt, that there 

[ 1633 



The American Mind 

was an ideal United States, which Dickens did 
not discover during that first visit of 1842 ; he 
would have set the Cambridge which he knew 
over against the Cincinnati viewed by Mrs. 
Trollope ; he would have asserted that the 
homes characterized by refinement, by cultiva- 
tion, by pure and simple sentiment, made up 
the true America. But even among Longfel- 
low's own contemporaries there was Whitman, 
who felt that the true America was something 
very different from that exquisitely tempered 
Ideal of Longfellow. There was Thoreau, who, 
over in Concord, had been pushing forward 
the frontier of the mind and senses, who had 
opened his back-yard gate, as it were, upon the 
boundless and mysterious territory of Nature. 
There was Emerson, who was preaching an 
intellectual independence of the Old World 
which should correspond to the political and 
social independence of the Western Hemi- 
sphere. There was Parkman, whose hatred of 
philanthropy, whose lack of spirituality, is a 
striking illustration of the rebound of New 
England idealism against itself, of the reaction 
into stoicism. What different worlds these men 
lived in, and yet they were all inhabitants, so to 

[ 164] 



Romance and Reaction 

speak, of the same parish ; most of them met 
often around the same table ! The lesson of 
their variety of experience and differences of 
gifts as workmen in that great palace of litera- 
ture which is so variously built, is that no action 
and reaction in the imaginative world is ever 
final. Least of all do these actions and reactions 
affect the fortunes of true romance. The born 
dreamer may fall from one dream into another, 
but he still murmurs, in the famous line of 
William Ellery Channing, — 

"If my bark sinks, 'tis to another sea." 

No line in our literature is more truly Ameri- 
can, — unless it be that other splendid meta- 
phor, by David Wasson, which says the same 
thing in other words : — 

" Life's gift outruns my fancies far. 
And drowns the dream 
In larger stream. 
As morning drinks the morning- star." 



V 

Humor and Satire 

A DISTINGUISHED professor in the Harvard 
Divinity School once began a lecture on Com- 
edy by saying that the study of the comic had 
made him realize for the first time that a joke 
was one of the most solemn things in the world. 
The analysis of humor is no easy matter. It is 
hard to say which is the more dreary : an es- 
say on humor illustrated by a series of jokes, 
or an exposition of humor in the technical 
terms of philosophy. No subject has been more 
constantly discussed. But it remains difficult to 
decide what humor is. It is easier to declare 
what seemed humorous to our ancestors, or 
what seems humorous to us to-day. For humor 
is a shifting thing. The well-known collections 
of the writings of American humorists surprise 
us by their revelation of the changes in public 
taste. Humor — or the sense of humor — 
alters while we are watching. What seemed a 

[ i66 ] 



Humor and Satire 

good joke to us yesterday seems but a poor 
joke to-day. And yet it is the same joke ! 
What is true of the individual is all the more 
true of the national sense of humor. This vast 
series of kaleidoscopic changes which we call 
America ; has it produced a humor of its own ? 

Let us avoid for the moment the treacher- 
ous territory of definitions. Let us, rather, take 
one concrete example : a pair of men, a knight 
and his squire, who for three hundred years 
have ridden together down the broad highway 
of the world's imagination. Everybody sees 
that Don Quixote and Sancho Panza are hu- 
morous. Define them as you will — idealist 
and realist, knight and commoner, dreamer 
and proverb-maker — these figures represent 
to all the world two poles of human experi- 
ence. A Frenchman once said that all of us are 
Don Quixotes on one day and Sancho Panzas 
on the next. Humor springs from this con- 
trast. It is the electric flash between the two 
poles of experience. 

Most philosophers who have meditated 
upon the nature of the comic point out that it 
is closely allied with the tragic. Flaubert once 
compared our human idealism to the flight of 

C '67 ] 



The American Mind 

a swallow; at one moment it is soaring toward 
the sunset, at the next moment some one 
shoots it and it tumbles into the mud with 
blood upon its glistening wings. The sudden 
poignant contrast between light, space, free- 
dom, and the wounded bleeding bird in the 
mud, is of the very essence of tragedy. But 
something like that is always happening in com- 
edy. There is the same element of incongruity, 
without the tragic consequence. It is only the 
humorist who sees things truly because he sees 
both the greatness and the littleness of mor- 
tals; but even he may not know whether to 
laugh or to cry at what he sees. Those colli- 
sions and contrasts out of which the stuff of 
tragedy is woven, such as the clash between the 
higher and lower nature of a man, between his 
past and his present, between one's duties to 
himself and to his family or the state, between, 
in a word, his character and his situation, are 
all illustrated in comedy as completely as in 
tragedy. The countryman in the city, the city 
man in the country, is in a comic situation. 
Here is a coward named Falstaff, and Shake- 
speare puts him into battle. Here is a vain per- 
son,and Malvolio is imprisoned and twitted by 

[ i68 ] 



Humor and Satire 

a clown. Here is an ignoramus, and Dogberry 
is placed on thejudge's bench. These contrasts 
might, indeed, be tragic enough, but they are 
actually comic. Such characters are not ruled 
by fate but by a sportive chance. The gods 
connive at them. They are ruled, like tragic 
characters, by necessity and blindness ; but the 
blindness, instead of leading to tragic ruin, 
leads only to beingcaught as in some harmless 
game of blind-man's-buff. There is retribution, 
but Falstaff is only pinched by the fairies. Com- 
edy of intrigue and comedy of character lead 
to no real catastrophe. The end of it on the 
stage is not death but matrimony ; and " home 
well pleased we go." 

A thousand definitions of humor lay stress 
upon this element of incongruity. Hazlitt be- 
gins his illuminating lectures on the Comic 
Writers by declaring, "Man is the only ani- 
mal that laughs or weeps; for he is the only 
animal that is struck with the difference between 
what things are and what they ought to be." 
James Russell Lowell took the same ground. 
" Humor," he said once, " lies in the contrast 
of two ideas. It is the universal disenchanter. 
It is the sense of comic contradiction which 

[ 169] 



The American Mind 

arises from the perpetual comment which the 
understanding makes upon the impressions re- 
ceived through the imagination/' If that sen- 
tence seems too abstract, all we need do is to 
think of Sancho Panza, the man of understand- 
ing, talking about Don Quixote, the man of 
imagination. 

We must not multiply quotations, but it is 
impossible not to remember the distinction 
made by Carlyle in writing about Richter. 
" True humor," says Carlyle, " springs not 
more from the head than from the heart. It is 
not contempt; its essence is love." In other 
words, not merely the great humorists of the 
world's literature — Cervantes, Rabelais, Field- 
ing, Thackeray, Dickens — but the writers of 
comic paragraphs for to-morrow's newspaper, 
all regard our human incongruities with a sort 
of affection. The comic spirit is essentially a 
social spirit. The great figures of tragedy are 
solitary. The immortal figures of comedy be- 
long to a social group. 

No recent discussion of humor is more il- 
luminating and more directly applicable to the 
conditions of American life than that of the 
contemporary French philosopher Bergson. 

[ 170 ] 



Humor and Satire 

Bergson insists throughout his brilliant little 
book on Laughter that laughter is a social func- 
tion. Life demands elasticity. Hence whatever 
is stiiF, automatic, machine-like, excites a smile. 
We laugh when a person gives us the impression 
of being a thing, — a sort of mechanical toy. 
Every inadaptation of the individual to society 
is potentially comic. Thus laughter becomes 
a social initiation. It is a kind of hazing which 
we visit upon one another. But we do not iso- 
late the comic personage as we do the solitary, 
tragic figure. The comic personage is usually 
a type ; he is one of an absurd group; he is a 
miser, a pedant, a pretentious person, a doctor 
or a lawyer in whom the professional traits 
have become automatic so that he thinks more 
of his professional behavior than he does of 
human health and human justice. Of all these 
separatist tendencies, laughter is the great cor- 
rective. When the individual becomes set in 
his ways, obstinate, preoccupied, automatic, 
the rest of us laugh him out of it if we can. 
Of course all that we are thinking about at 
the moment is his ridiculousness. But never- 
theless, by laughing we become the saviors of 
society. 

[ '71 ] 



The American Mind 

No one, I think, can help observing that 
this conception of humor as incongruity is par- 
ticularly applicable to a new country. On the 
new soil and under the new sky, in new social 
groupings, all the fundamental contrasts and 
absurdities of our human society assume a new 
value. We see them under a fresh light. They 
are differently focussed. The broad humors 
of the camp, its swift and picturesque play of 
light and shade, its farce and caricature no less 
than its atmosphere of comradeship, of senti- 
ment, and of daring, are all transferred to the 
humor of the newly settled country. The very 
word "humor" once meant singularity of char- 
acter, "some extravagant habit, passion, or af- 
fection,*' says Dryden, " particular to some one 
person." Every newly opened country en- 
courages, for a while, this oddness and incon- 
gruity of individual character. It fosters it, 
and at the same moment it laughs at it. It de- 
cides that such characters are " humorous." As 
the social conditions of such a country change, 
the old pioneer instinct for humor, and the 
pioneer forms of humor, may endure, though 
the actual frontier may have moved far westward. 

There is another conception of humor 

[ 172 ] 



Humor and Satire 

scarcely less famous than the notion of incon- 
gruity. It is the conception associated with the 
name of the English philosopher Hobbes, who 
thought that humor turned upon a sense of 
superiority. " The passion of laughter/' said 
Hobbes, "is nothing else but sudden glory 
arising from some sudden conception of some 
eminency in ourselves by comparison with the 
inferiority of others, or with our own formerly." 
Too cynical a view, declare many critics, but 
they usually end by admitting that there is a 
good deal in it after all. I am inclined to think 
that Hobbes*s famous definition is more ap- 
plicable to wit than it is to humor. Wit is more 
purely intellectual than humor. It rejoices in 
its little triumphs. It requires, as has been re- 
marked, a good head, while humor takes a 
good heart, and fun good spirits. If you take 
Carlyle literally when he says that humor is 
love, you cannot wholly share Hobbes's con- 
viction that laughter turns upon a sense of 
superiority, and yet surely we all experience a 
sense of kindly amusement which turns upon 
the fact that we, the initiated, are superior, for 
the moment, to the unlucky person who is just 
having his turn in being hazed. It may be the 

[ 173 ] ■ 



The American Mind 

play of intellect or the coarser play of animal 
spirits. One might venture to make a distinc- 
tion between the low comedy of the Latin races 
and the low comedy of the Germanic races 
by pointing out that the superiority in the 
Latin comedy usually turns upon quicker wits, 
whereas the superiority in the Germanic farce 
is likely to turn upon stouter muscles. But 
whether it be a play of wits or of actual cud- 
gelling, the element of superiority and inferi- 
ority is almost always there. 

I remember that some German, I dare say 
in a forgotten lecture-room, once illustrated the 
humor of superiority in this way. A company 
of strolling players sets up its tent in a coun- 
try village. On the front seat is a peasant, 
laughing at the antics of the clown. The peas- 
ant flatters himself that he sees through those 
practical jokes on the stage; the clown ought 
to have seen that he was about to be tripped 
up, but he was too stupid. But the peasant 
saw that it was coming all the time. He laughs 
accordingly. Just behind the peasant sits the 
village shopkeeper. He has watched stage 
clowns many a time and he laughs, not at the 
humor of the farce, but at the naive laughter 

[ 174 ] 



Humor and Satire 

of the peasant in front of him. He, the shop- 
keeper, is superior to such broad and obvious 
humor as that. Behind the shopkeeper sits the 
schoolmaster. The schoolmaster is a pedant ; 
he has probably lectured to his boys on the 
theory of humor, and he smiles in turn at the 
smile of superiority on the face of the shop- 
keeper. Well, peeping in at the door of the tent 
is a man of the world, who glances at the clown, 
then at the peasant, then at the shop-keeper, 
then at the schoolmaster, each one of whom 
is laughing at the others, and the man of the 
world laughs at them all ! 

Let us take an even simpler illustration. We 
all know the comfortable sense of proprietor- 
ship which we experience after a few days' so- 
journ at a summer hotel. We know our place 
at the table ; we call the head waiter by his first 
name ; we are not even afraid of the clerk. Now 
into this hotel, where we sit throned in con- 
scious superiority, comes a new arrival. He has 
not yet learned the exits and entrances. He 
starts for the kitchen door inadvertently when 
he should be headed for the drawing-room. 
We smile at him. Why ? Precisely because 
that was what we did on the morning of our 

[ 175] 



The American Mind 

own arrival. We have been initiated, and it is 
now his turn. 

If it is true that a newly settled country- 
offers endless opportunities for the humor 
which turns upon incongruity, it is also true 
that the new country offers countless occasions 
for the humor which turns upon the sudden 
glory of superiority. The backwoodsman is 
amusing to the man of the settlements, and the 
backwoodsman, in turn, gets his full share of 
amusement out of watching the " tenderfoot" 
in the woods. It is simply the case of the old 
resident versus the newcomer. The superior- 
ity need be in no sense a cruel or taunting su- 
periority, although it often happens to be so. 
The humor of the pioneers is not very deli- 
cately polished. The joke of the frontier tavern 
or grocery store is not always adapted to a 
drawing-room audience, but it turns in a sur- 
prisingly large number of instances upon ex- 
actly the same intellectual or social superiority 
which gives point to the bon mots of the most 
cultivated and artificial society in the world. 

The humor arising from incongruity, then, 
and the humor arising from a sense of supe- 
riority, are both of them social in their nature. 

[ 176 ] 



Humor and Satire 

No less social, surely, is the function of satire. 
It is possible that satire may be decaying, that 
it is becoming, if it has not already become, a 
mere splendid or odious tradition. But let us 
call it a great tradition and, upon the whole, a 
splendid one. Even when debased to purely 
party or personal uses, the verse satire of a 
Dryden retains its magnificent resonance ; " the 
ring," says Saintsbury, " as of a great bronze 
coin thrown down on marble.** The malignant 
couplets of an Alexander Pope still gleam like 
malevolent jewels through the dust of two hun- 
dred years. The cynicism, the misanthropy, 
the mere adolescent badness of Byron are pow- 
erless to clip the wings of the wide-ranging, far- 
darting wit and humor and irony of Don Juan. 
The homely Yankee dialect, the provinciality, 
the " gnarly " flavor of the Biglow Papers do 
not prevent our finding in that pungent and 
resplendent satire the powers of Lowell at full 
play; and, what is more than that, the epitome 
of the American spirit in a moral crisis. 

I take the names of those four satirists, Drv- 
den, Pope, Byron, and Lowell, quiteat random; 
but they serve to illustrate a significant principle; 
namely, that great satire becomes ennobled as 

C 177 ] 



The American Mind 

it touches communal, not merely individual 
interests, as it voices social and not merely in- 
dividual ideals. Those four modern satirists 
were steeped in the nationalistic political poetry 
of the OldTestament. They were familiar with 
its war anthems, dirges, and prophecies, its con- 
cern for the prosperity and adversity, the sin 
and the punishment, of a people. Here the 
writers of the Golden Age of English satire 
found their vocabulary and phrase-book, their 
grammar of politics and history, their models 
of good and evil kings ; and in that Biblical 
school of political poetry, which has affected our 
literature from the Reformation down to Mr. 
Kipling, there has always been a class in satire ! 
The satirical portraits, satirical lyrics, satirical 
parables of the Old Testament prophets are 
only less noteworthy than their audacity in 
striking high and hard. Their foes were the all- 
powerful: Babylon and Assyria and Egypt 
loom vast and terrible upon the canvases of 
Isaiah and Ezekiel ; and poets of a later time 
have learned there the secrets of social and po- 
litical idealism, and the signs of national doom. 
There are two familiar types of satire asso- 
ciated with the names of Horace and Juvenal. 

[ 178 ] 



Humor and Satire 

Both types are abundantly illustrated in Eng- 
lish and American literature. When you meet 
a bore or a hypocrite or a plain rascal, is it bet- 
ter to chastise him with laughter or to flay him 
with shining fury ? I shall take both horns of the 
dilemma and assert that both methods are ad- 
mirableand socially useful. The minor English 
and American poets of the seventeenth and 
eighteenth centuries were never weary of speak- 
ing of satire as a terrific weapon which they 
were forced to wield as saviors of society. But 
whether they belonged to the urbane school of 
Horace, or to the severely moralistic school of 
Juvenal, they soon found themselves falling 
into one or the other of two modes of writing. 
They addressed either the little audience or the 
big audience, and they modified their styles ac- 
cordingly. The great satirists of the Renais- 
sance, for example, like More, Erasmus, and 
Rabelais, wrote simply for the persons who 
were qualified to understand them. More and 
Erasmus wrote their immortal satires in Latin. 
By so doing they addressed themselves to 
cultivated Europe. They ran no risk of being 
misunderstood by persons for whom the joke 
was not intended. All readers of Latin were 

[ 179 ] 



The American Mind 

like members of one club. Of course member- 
ship was restricted to the learned, but had not 
Horace talked about being content with a few 
readers, and was not Voltaire coming by and by 
with the advice to try for the " little public " ? 

The typical wit of the eighteenth century, 
whether in London, Paris, or in Franklin's 
printing-shop in Philadelphia, had, of course, 
abandoned Latin. But it still addressed itself 
to the " little public," to the persons who were 
qualified to understand. The circulation of the 
Spectator^ which represents so perfectly the wit, 
humor, and satire of the early eighteenth cen- 
tury in England, was only about ten thousand 
copies. This limited audience smiled at the ur- 
bane delicate touches of Mr. Steele and Mr. 
Addison. They understood the allusions. The 
fable concerned them and not the outsiders. It 
was something like Oliver Wendell Holmes 
reading his witty and satirical couplets to an 
audience of Harvard alumni. The jokes are in 
the vernacular, but in a vernacular as spoken 
in a certain social medium. It is all very de- 
lightful. 

But there is a very different kind of audience 
gathering all this while outside the Harvard 

[ i8o] 



Humor and Satire 

gates. These two publics for the humorist we 
may call the invited and the uninvited; the in- 
ner circle and the outer circle : first, those who 
have tickets for the garden party, and who 
stroll over the lawn, decorously gowned and 
properly coated, conversing with one another 
in the accepted social accents and employing 
the recognized social adjectives; and second, 
the crowd outside the gates, — curious, satir- 
ical, good-natured in the main, straightforward 
of speech and quick to applaud a ready wit or 
a humor-loving eye or a telling phrase spoken 
straight from the heart of the mob. 

Will an author choose to address the selected 
guests or the casual crowd? Either way lies 
fame, if one does it well. Your uninvited men 
find themselves talking to the uninvited crowd. 
Before they know it they are famous too. They 
are fashioning another manner of speech. Defoe 
is there, with his saucy ballads selling trium- 
phantly under his very pillory ; with his 'True- 
Born Englishman puncturing forever the fiction 
of the honorable ancestry of the English aris- 
tocracy ; with his Crusoe and Moll Flanders^ 
written, as Lamb said long afterwards, for the 
servant-maid and the sailor. Swift is there, with 

[ i8i ] 



The American Mind 

his terrific Drapiers Lei I ers,a.nonymous,3.imed 
at the uneducated, with cold fury bludgeoning 
a government into obedience ; with his Gulli- 
ver s 'Travels^ so transparent upon the surface 
that a child reads the book with delight and 
remains happily ignorant that it is a satire upon 
humanity. And then, into the London of Defoe 
and Swift, and i nto the very centre of the middle- 
class mob, steps, in 1724, the bland Benjamin 
Franklin in search of a style " smooth, clear, 
and short," and for half a century, with con- 
summate skill, shapes that style to his audience. 
His young friend Thomas Paine takes the style 
and touches it with passion, until he becomes 
the perfect pamphleteer, and his Crisis is worth 
as much to our Revolution — men said — as 
the sword of Washington. After another gen- 
eration the gaunt Lincoln, speaking that same 
plain prose of Defoe, Swift, Franklin, and Paine, 

— Lincoln who began his first Douglas debate, 
not like his cultivated opponent with the con- 
ventional " Ladies and Gentlemen,*' but with 
the ominously intimate, "My Fellow Citizens," 

— Lincoln is saying, " I am not master of lan- 
guage; I have not a fine education; I am not 
capable of entering into a disquisition upon dia- 

[ 182 ] 



Humor and Satire 

lectics, as I believe you call it; but I do not 
believe the language I employed bears any such 
construction as Judge Douglas puts upon it. 
But I don't care about a quibble in regard to 
words. I know what I meant, and / will not 
leave this crowd in doubt, if I can explain it to 
them, what I really meant in the use of that 
paragraph." 

^^ I will not leave this crowd in doubt ^^ ; that is 
the final accent of our spoken prose, the prose 
addressed to one's fellow citizens, to the great 
public. This is the prose spoken in the humor 
and satire of Dickens. Dressed in a queer dia- 
lect, and put into satirical verse, it is the lan- 
guage of the Biglow Papers. Uttered with the 
accent of a Chicago Irishman, it is the prose 
admired by millions of the countrymen of 
'^Mr Dooley." 

Satire written to the " little public " tends 
toward the social type ; that written to the 
" great public " to the political type. It is ob- 
vious that just as a newly settled country offers 
constant opportunity for the humor of incon- 
gruity and the humor arising from a sense of 
superiority, it likewise affords a daily stimulus 
to the use of satire. That moralizing Puritan 

[ 183 ] 



The American Mind 

strain of censure which lost none of its harsh- 
ness in crossing the Atlantic Ocean found full 
play in the colonial satire of the seventeenth 
and eighteenth centuries. As the topics for sat- 
ire grew widerand more political in their scope, 
the audiences increased. To-day the very old- 
est issues of the common life of that queer 
" political animal " named man are discussed 
by our popular newspaper satirists in the pre- 
sence of a democratic audience that stretches 
from the Atlantic to the Pacific. 

Is there, then, a distinctly American type of 
humor and satire ? I think it would be difficult 
to prove that our composite American nation- 
ality has developed a mode of humor and sat- 
ire which is racially different from the humor 
and satire of the Old World. All racial lines 
in literature are extremely difficult to draw. If 
you attempt to analyze English humor, you 
find that it is mostly Scotch or Irish. If you 
put Scotch and Irish humor under the micro- 
scope, you discover that most of the best 
Scotch and Irish jokes are as old as the Greeks 
and the Egyptians. You pick up a copy of 
Fliegende Blatter and you get keen amusement 
from its revelation of German humor. But how 

[ 184 ] 



Humor and Satire 

much of this humor, after all, is either essen- 
tially universal in its scope or else a matter of 
mere stage-setting and machinery ? Without 
the Prussian lieutenant the Fliegende Blatter 
would lose half its point; nor can one imagine 
a Punch without a picture of the English po- 
liceman. The lieutenant and the policeman, 
however, are a part of the accepted social furni- 
ture of the two countries. They belong to the 
decorative background of the social drama. 
They heighten the effectiveness of local humor, 
but it may be questioned whether they afford 
any evidence of genuine racial differentiation as 
to the sense of the comic. 

What one can abundantly prove, however, 
is that the United States afford a new national 
field for certain types of humor and satire. Our 
English friends are never weary of writing mag- 
azine articles about Yankee humor, in which 
they explain the peculiarities of the American 
joke with a dogmatism which has sometimes 
been thought to prove that there is such a 
thing as national lack of humor, whether there 
be such a thing as national humor or not. One 
such article, I remember, endeavored to prove 
that the exaggeration often found in American 

C 185] 



The American Mind 

humor was due to the vastness of the Amer- 
ican continent. Our geography, that is to say, 
is too much for the Yankee brain. Mr. Bir- 
rell, an expert judge of humor, surely, thinks 
that the characteristic of American humor Hes 
in its habit of speaking of something hideous 
in a tone of levity. Many Englishmen, in fact, 
have been as much impressed with this min- 
imizing trick of American humor as with the 
converse trick of magnifying. Upon the Con- 
tinent the characteristic trait of American 
humor has often been thought to be its ex- 
uberance of phrase. Many shrewd judges of 
our newspaper humor have pointed out that 
one of its most favorite methods is the sup- 
pression of one link in the chain of logical 
reasoning. Such generalizations as these are 
always interesting, although they may not take 
us very far. 

Yet it is clear that certain types of humor 
and satire have proved to be specially adapted 
to the American soil and climate. Whether or 
not these types are truly indigenous one may 
hesitate to say, yet it remains true that the well- 
known conditions of American life have stim- 
ulated certain varieties of humor into such a 

[ i86 ] 



Humor and Satire 

richness of manifestation as the Old World can 
scarcely show. 

Curiously enough, one of the most perfected 
types of American humor is that urbane Ho- 
ratian variety which has often been held to be 
the exclusive possession of the cultivated and 
restricted societies of older civilization. Yet it 
is precisely this kind of humor which has been 
the delight of some of the most typical Amer- 
ican minds. Benjamin Franklin, for example, 
modelled his style and his sense of the humor- 
ous on the papers of the Spectator, He pro- 
duced humorous fables and apologues, choice 
little morsels of social and political persiflage, 
which were perfectly suited, not merely to the 
taste of London in the so-called golden age of 
English satire, but to the tone of the wittiest 
salons of Paris in the age when the old regime 
went tottering, talking, quoting, jesting to its 
fall. Read Franklin's charming and wise let- 
ter to Madame Brillon about giving too much 
for the whistle. It is the perfection of well- 
bred humor; a humor very American, very 
Franklinian, although its theme and tone and 
phrasing might well have been envied by Hor- 
ace or Voltaire. 

[ '87] 



The American Mind 

The gentle humor of Irving is marked by 
precisely those traits of urbanity and restraint 
which characterize the parables of Franklin. 
Does not the Autocrat of the Breakfast liable 
itself presuppose the existence of a truly culti- 
vated society? Its tone — "As I was saying 
when I was interrupted " — is the tone of the in- 
timate circle. There was so much genuine hu- 
manity in the gay little doctor that persons born 
outside the circle of Harvard College and the 
North Shore and Boston felt themselves at once 
initiated by the touch of his merry wand into 
a humanized, kindly theory of life. The hu- 
mor of George William Curtis had a similarly 
mellow and ripened quality. It is a curious 
comment upon that theory of Americans which 
represents us primarily as a loud-voiced, as- 
sertive, headstrong people, to be thus made 
aware that many of the humorists whom we 
have loved best are precisely those whose writ- 
ing has been marked by the most delicate re- 
straint, whose theory of life has been the most 
highly urbane and civilized, whose work is in- 
distinguishable in tone — though its materials 
are so different — from that of other humorous 
writers on the other side of the Atlantic. On 

[ i88 ] 



Humor and Satire 

its social side all this is a fresh proof of the ex- 
traordinary adaptability of the American mind. 
On the literary side it is one more evidence 
of the national fondness for neatness and per- 
fection of workmanship. 

But we are something other than a nation of 
mere lovers and would-be imitators of Charles 
Lamb. The moralistic type of humor, the crack 
of Juvenal's whip, as well as the delicate Ho- 
ratian playing around the heart-strings, has 
characterized our humor and satire from the 
beginning. At bottom the American is serious. 
Beneath the surface of his jokes there is moral 
earnestness, there is ethical passion. Take, for 
example, some of the apothegms of " Josh 
Billings." He failed with the public until he 
took up the trick of misspelling his words. 
When he had once gained his public he some- 
times delighted them with sheer whimsical in- 
congruity, like this : — 

" There iz 2 things in this life for which we 
are never fully prepared, and that iz twins." 

But more often the tone is really grave. It 
IS only the spelling that is queer. The moral- 
izing might be by La Bruyere or La Roche- 
foucauld. Take this : — 

C 189 ] 



The American Mind 

" Life iz short, but it iz long enufF to ruin 
enny man who wants tew be ruined." 

Or this : — 

" When a feller gits a goin doun hill, it dus 
seem as tho evry thing had bin greased for the 
okashun." That is what writers of tragedy 
have been showing, ever since the Greeks ! 

Or finally, this, which has the perfect tone 
of the great French moralists : — 

"It iz a verry deUcate job to forgive a man 
without lowering him in his own estimashun, 
and yures too." 

See how the moralistic note is struck in the 
field of political satire. It is 1866, and "Pe- 
troleum V. Nasby," writing from " Confedrit 
X Roads," Kentucky, gives Deekin Pogram's 
views on education. " He did n't bleeve in 
edjucashun, generally speekin. The common 
people was better off without it, ez edjucashun 
hed a tendency to unsettle their minds. He 
had seen the evil efFex ov it in niggers and poor 
whites. So soon ez a nigger masters the spellin 
book and gits into noosepapers, he becomes 
dissatisfied with his condishin, and hankers 
after a better cabin and more wages. He to- 
wunst begins to insist onto ownin land hisself, 

[ 190 ] 



Humor and Satire 

and givin his children edjucashun,and,ez a nig- 
ger, for our purposes, aint worth a soo markee." 

The single phrase, " ez a nigger,** spells 
a whole chapter of American history. 

That quotation from "Petroleum V. Nasby " 
serves also to illustrate a species of American 
humor which has been of immense historical 
importance and which has never been more 
active than it is to-day : the humor, namely, of 
local, provincial, and sectional types. Much of 
this falls under Bergson's conception of humor 
as social censure. It rebukes the extravagance, 
the rigidity, the unawareness of the individual 
who fails to adapt himself to his social environ- 
ment. It takes the place, in our categories of 
humor, of those types of class humor and 
satire in which European literature is so rich. 
The mobility of our population, the constant 
shifting of professions and callings, has pre- 
vented our developing fixed class types of 
humor. We have not even the lieutenant or 
the policeman as permanent members of our 
humorous stock company. The policeman of 
to-day may be mayor or governor to-morrow. 
The lieutenant may go back to his grocery 
wagon or on to his department store. But 

[ 191 ] 



The American Mind 

whenever and wherever such an individual fails 
to adapt himself to his new companions, fails 
to take on, as it were, the colors of his new 
environment, to speak in the new social accents, 
to follow the recognized patterns of behavior, 
then the kindly whip of the humorist is already 
cracking round his ears. The humor and sat- 
ire of college undergraduate journalism turns 
mainly upon the recognized ability or inability 
of different individuals to adapt themselves to 
their changing pigeon-holes in the college or- 
ganism. A freshman must behave like a fresh- 
man, or he is laughed at. Yet he must not be- 
have as if he were nothing but the automaton 
of a freshman, or he will be laughed at more 
merrily still. 

One of the first discoveries of our earlier 
humorists was the Down-East Yankee. " I 'm 
going to Portland whether or no," says Major 
Jack Downing, telling the story of his boy- 
hood ; " I *11 see what this world is made of yet. 
So I tackled up the old horse and packed in a 
load of ax handles and a few notions, and mo- 
ther fried me a few doughnuts . . . for I told 
her I did n't know how long I should be gone,** 
— and off he goes to Portland, to see what the 

[ 192 ] 



Humor and Satire 

world is made of. It is a little like Defoe, and 
a good deal like the young Ulysses, bent upon 
knowing cities and men and upon getting the 
best of bargains. 

Each generation of Americans has known 
something like that trip to Portland. Each 
generation has had to measure its wits, its re- 
sources, its manners, against new standards of 
comparison. At every stage of the journey 
there are mishaps and ridiculous adventures; 
but everywhere, likewise, there is zest, con- 
quest, initiation ; the heart of a boy who " wants 
to know'* — as the Yankees used to say; or, 
in more modern phrase, — 

** to admire and for to see, 
For to behold this world so wide.*' 

There is the same romance of adventure in 
the humor concerning the Irishman, the Negro, 
the Dutchman, the Dago, the farmer. Each in 
turn becomes humorous through failure to 
adapt himself to the prevalent type. A long- 
bearded Jew is not ridiculous in Russia, but he 
rapidly becomes ridiculous even on the East 
Side of New York. Underneath all this pop- 
ular humor of the comic supplements one may 
catch glimpses of the great revolving wheels 

[ ^92^ ] 



The American Mind 

which are crushing the vast majority of our 
population into something like uniformity. It 
is a process of social attrition. The sharp edges 
of individual behavior get rounded off. The 
individual loses color and picturesqueness, pre- 
cisely as he casts aside the national costume of 
the land from which he came. His speech, his 
gait, his demeanor, become as nearly as pos- 
sible like the speech and carriage of all his 
neighbors. If he resists, he is laughed at ; and if 
he does not personally heed the laughter, he 
may be sure that his children do. It is the child- 
ren of our immigrants who catch the sly smiles 
of their school-fellows, who overhear jokes 
from the newspapers and on the street corners, 
who bring home to their foreign-born fathers 
and mothers the imperious childish demand to 
make themselves like unto everybody else. 

A similar social function is performed by that 
well-known mode of American humor which 
ridicules the inhabitants of certain states. Why 
should New Jersey, for example, be more ridi- 
culous than Delaware ? In the eyes of the news- 
paper paragrapher it unquestionably is, just as 
Missouri has more humorous connotations than 
Kentucky. We may think we understand why 

[ 194 ] 



Humor and Satire 

we smile when a man says that he comes from 
Kalamazoo or Oshkosh, but the smile when he 
says " Philadelphia " or " Boston " or " Brook- 
lyn" is only a trifle more subtle. It is none the 
less real. Why should the suburban dweller of 
every city be regarded with humorous conde- 
scension by the man who is compelled to sleep 
within the city limits ? No one can say, and yet 
without that humor of the suburbs the comic 
supplements of American newspapers would 
be infinitely less entertaining, — to the people 
who enjoy comic supplements. 

So it is with the larger divisions of our na- 
tional life. Yankee, Southerner, Westerner, 
Californian, Texan, each type provokes certain 
connotations of humor when viewed by any of 
the other types. Each type in turn has its note 
of provinciality when compared with the norm 
of the typical American. It is quite possible to 
maintain that our literature, like our social life, 
has suflFered by this ever-present American sense 
of the ridiculous. Our social consciousness 
might be far more various and richly colored, 
there might be more true provincial independ- 
ence of speech and custom and imagination if 
we had not to reckon with this ever-present cen- 

[ ^9S ] 



The American Mind 

sure of laughter, this fear of finding ourselves, 
our city, our section, out of touch with the pre- 
valent tone and temper of the country as a 
whole. It is one of the forfeits we are bound to 
pay when we play the great absorbing game of 
democracy. 

We are now ready to ask once more whether 
there is a truly national type of American hu- 
mor. Viewed exclusively from the standpoint 
of racial characteristics, we have seen that this 
question as to a national type of humor is diffi- 
cult to answer. But we have seen with equal 
clearness that the United States has offered a 
singularly rich field for the development of the 
sense of humor ; and furthermore that there 
are certain specialized forms of humor which 
have flourished luxuriantly upon our soil. Our 
humorists have made the most of their native 
materials. Every pioneer trait of versatility, 
curiosity, shrewdness, has been turned some- 
how to humorous account. The very institu- 
tions of democracy, moulding day by day and 
generation after generation the habits and the 
mental characteristics of millions of men, have 
produced a social atmosphere in which humor 
is one of the most indisputable elements. 

[ 196] 



Humor and Satire 

I recall a notable essay by Mr. Charles John- 
ston on the essence of American humor in which 
he applies to the conditions of American life 
one familiar distinction between humor and wit. 
Wit, he asserts, scores off the other man, hu- 
mor does not. Wit frequently turns upon tri- 
bal differences, upon tribal vanity. The mor- 
dant wit of the Jew, for example, from the 
literature of the Old Testament down to the 
raillery of Heine, has turned largely upon the 
sense of racial superiority, of intellectual and 
moral differences. But true humor, Mr. John- 
ston goes on to argue, has always a binding, a 
uniting quality. Thus Huckleberry Finn and 
Jim Hawkins, white man and black man, are 
afloat together on the Mississippi River raft and 
they are made brethren by the fraternal quality 
of Mark Twain's humor. Thus the levelling 
quality of Bret Harte's humor bridges social 
and moral chasms. It creates an atmosphere 
of charity and sympathy. In fact, the typical 
American humor, according to the opinion of 
Mr. Johnston, emphasizes the broad and hu- 
mane side of our common nature. It reveals 
the common soul. It possesses a surplusage of 
power, of buoyancy and of conquest over cir- 

[ 197 ] 



The American Mind 

cumstances. It means at its best a humanizing 
of our hearts. 

Some people will think that all this is too 
optimistic, but if you are not optimistic enough 
you cannot keep up with the facts. Certain it 
is that the pioneers of American national hu- 
mor, the creators of what we may call the "all- 
American*' type of humor, have possessed pre- 
cisely the qualities which Mr. Johnston has 
pointed out. They are apparent in the pro- 
ductions of Artemus Ward. The present gen- 
eration vaguely remembers Artemus Ward as 
the man who was willing to send all his wife's 
relatives to the war and who, standing by the 
tomb of Shakespeare, thought it "a success." 
But no one who turns to the almost forgotten 
pages of that kindly jester can fail to be im- 
pressed by his sunny quality, by the atmosphere 
of fraternal affection which glorifies his queer 
spelling and his somewhat threadbare witti- 
cisms. Mark Twain, who is universally re- 
cognized by Europeans as a representative of 
typical American humor, had precisely those 
qualities of pioneer curiosity, swift versatility, 
absolute democracy, which are characteristic 
of the national temper. His lively accounts of 

[ 198 ] 



Humor and Satire 

frontier experiences in Roughing Ity his com- 
ments upon the old world in Innocents Abroad 
and A Tramp Abroad, his hatred of pretence 
and injustice, his scorn at sentimentality coupled 
with his insistence upon the rights of sentiment, 
in a word his persistent idealism, make Mark 
Twain one of the most representative of Amer- 
ican writers. Largeness, freedom, human sym- 
pathy, are revealed upon every page. 

It is true that the dangers of American hu- 
mor are no less in evidence there. There is the 
danger of extravagance, which in Mark Twain's 
earlier writings was carried to lengths of ab- 
surdity. There is the old danger of the profes- 
sional humorist of fearing to fail to score his 
point, and so of underscoring it with painful 
reiteration. Mark Twain is frequently gro- 
tesque. Sometimes there is evidence of imper- 
fect taste, or of bad taste. Sometimes there is 
actual vulgarity. In his earlier books particu- 
larly there is revealed that lack of discipline 
which has been such a constant accompaniment 
of American writing. Yet a native of Hanni- 
bal, Missouri, trained on a river steamboat and 
in a country printing-office and in mining- 
camps, can scarcely be expected to exhibit the 

[ 199 ] 



The American Mind 

finely balanced critical sense of a Matthew Ar- 
nold. Mark Twain was often accused in the 
first years of his international reputation of a 
characteristically American lack of reverence. 
He is often irreverent. But here again the 
boundaries of his irreverence are precisely those 
which the national instinct itself has drawn. 
The joke stops short of certain topics which the 
American mind holds sacred. We all have our 
favorite pages in the writings of this versatile 
and richly endowed humorist, but I think no 
one can read his description of the coyote in 
Roughing It, and Huckleberry Finn's account 
of his first visit to the circus, without realiz- 
ing that in this fresh revelation of immemorial 
human curiosity, this vivid perception of in- 
congruity and surprise, this series of lightning- 
like flashes from one pole of experience to the 
other, we have not only masterpieces of world 
humor, but a revelation of a distinctly Amer- 
ican reaction to the facts presented by univer- 
sal experience. 

The picturesque personality and the extra- 
ordinarily successful career of Mark Twain 
kept him, during the last twenty-five years of 
his life, in the focus of public attention. But 

[ 200 ] 



Humor and Satire 

no one can read the pages of the older Amer- 
ican humorists, — or try to recall to mind the 
names of paragraphers who used to write comic 
matter for this or that newspaper, — without 
realizing how swiftly the du§t of oblivion set- 
tles upon all the makers of mere jokes. It is 
enough, perhaps, that they caused a smile for 
the moment. Even those humorists who mark 
epochs in the history of American provincial 
and political satire, like Seba Smith with his 
Major Jack D owning ^ Newell with his Papers 
of Orpheus C Kerr^ " Petroleum V. Nasby's *' 
Letters from the Confedrit X Roads, Shillaber's 
Mrs. Partington, — all these have disappeared 
round the turn of the long road. 

•*Hans Breitman gife a barty — 
Vhere ish dot barty now ? " 

It seems as if the conscious humorists, the 
professional funny writers, had the shortest 
lease of literary life. They play their little comic 
parts before a well-disposed but restless audi- 
ence which is already impatiently waiting for 
some other " turn." One of them makes a hit 
with a song or story, just as a draughtsman for 
a Sunday colored supplement makes a hit with 
his " Mutt and Jeff." For a few months every- 

[ 20I ] 



The American Mind 

body smiles and then comes the long oblivion. 
The more permanent American humor has 
commonly been written by persons who were 
almost unconscious, not indeed of the fact that 
they were creating humorous characters, but 
unconscious of the effort to provoke a laugh. 
The smile lasts longer than the laugh. Perhaps 
that is the secret. One smiles as one reads the 
delicate sketches of Miss Jewett. One smiles 
over the stories of Owen Wister and of Thomas 
Nelson Page. The trouble, possibly, with the 
enduring qualities of the brilliant humorous 
stories of "O. Henry'* was that they tempt 
the reader to laugh too much and to smile too 
little. When one reads the Legend of Sleepy 
Hollow or Diedricb Knickerbocker s History of 
New Tork, it is always with this gentle part- 
ing of the lips, this kindly feeling toward the 
author, his characters and the world. A humor- 
ous page which produces that effect for gener- 
ation after generation, has thestamp of literature. 
One may doubt whether even the extraordi- 
nary fantasies of Mark Twain are more suc- 
cessful, judged by the mere vulgar test of con- 
crete results, than the delicate humor of Charles 
Lamb. Our current newspaper and magazine 

[ 202 ] 



Humor and Satire 

humor Is In no respect more fascinating than 
in its suggestion as to the permanent effect- 
iveness of its comic qualities. Who could say, 
when he first read Mr. Finley P. Dunne's 
" Mr. Dooley " sketches, whether this was 
something that a whole nation of readers would 
instantly and instinctively rejoice over, would 
find a genial revelation of American character- 
istics, would recognize as almost the final word 
of kindly satire upon our overworked, over- 
excited, over-anxious, over-self-conscious gen- 
eration? 

The range of this contemporary newspaper 
and magazine humor is well-nigh universal, — 
always saving, it is true, certain topics or states 
of mind which the American public cannot 
regard as topics for laughter. With these few 
exceptions nothing is too high or too low for 
it. The paragraphers joke about the wheel- 
barrow, the hen, the mule, the mother-in-law, 
the President of the United States. There is 
no ascending or descending scale of import- 
ance. Any of the topics can raise a laugh. If 
one examines a collection of American paro- 
dies, one will find that the happy national talent 
for fun-making finds full scope in the parody 

C 203 ] 



The American Mind 

and burlesque of the dearest national senti- 
ments. But no one minds ; everybody believes 
that the sentiments endure Vv^hile the jokes will 
pass. The jokes, intended as they are for an 
immense audience, necessarily lack subtlety. 
They tend to partake of the methods of pic- 
torial caricature. Indeed, caricature itself, as 
Bergson has pointed out, emphasizes those 
"automatic, mechanical-toy" traits of charac- 
ter and behavior which isolate the individual 
and make him ill adapted for his function in 
society. Our verbal wit and humor, no less 
than the pencil of our caricaturists, have this 
constant note of exaggeration. " These vio- 
lent delights have violent ends." But during 
their brief and laughing existence they serve 
to normalize society. They set up, as it were, 
a pulpit in the street upon which the comic 
spirit may mount and preach her useful ser- 
mon to all comers. 

Despite the universaHty of the objects of 
contemporary American humor, despite, too, 
its prevalent method of caricature, it remains 
true that its character is, on the whole, clean, 
easy-going, and kindly. The old satire of hatred 
has lost its force. No one knows why. " Satire 

[ 204 ] 



Humor and Satire 

has grown weak/* says Mr. Chesterton, " pre- 
cisely because belief has grown weak." That 
is one theory. The late Henry D. Lloyd, of 
Chicago, declared in one of his last books: 
" The world has outgrown the dialect and tem- 
per of hatred. The style of the imprecatory 
psalms and the denunciating prophets is out of 
date. No one knows these times if he is not 
conscious of this change." That is another 
theory. Again, party animosities are surely 
weaker than they were. Caricatures are less per- 
sonally offensive; if you doubt it, look at any 
of the collections of caricatures of Napoleon, 
or of George the Fourth. Irony is less often 
used by pamphleteers and journalists. It is a 
delicate rhetorical weapon, and journalists who 
aim at the great public are increasingly afraid 
to use it, lest the readers miss the point. In 
the editorials in the Hearst newspapers, for 
instance, there is plenty of invective and in- 
nuendo, but rarely irony: it might not be un- 
derstood, and the crowd must not be left in 
doubt. 

Possibly the old-fashioned satire has dis- 
appeared because the game is no longer consid- 
ered worth the candle. To puncture the tire of 

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The American Mind 

pretence is amusing enough ; but it is useless to 
stick tacks under the steam road-roller: the 
road-roller advances remorselessly and smooths 
down your mischievous little tacks and you 
too, indifferently. The huge interests of poli- 
tics, trade, progress, override your passion- 
ate protest. " Shall gravitation cease when you 
go by?" I do not compare Colonel Roosevelt 
with gravitation, but have all the satirical squibs 
against our famous contemporary, from the 
*' Alone in Cubia'* to the "Teddy-see," ever 
cost him, in a dozen years, a dozen votes ? 

Very likely Mr. Lloyd and Mr. Chesterton 
are right. We are less censorious than our an- 
cestors were. Americans, on the whole, try to 
avoid giving pain through speech. The sat- 
irists of the golden age loved that cruel exer- 
cise of power. Perhaps we take things less 
seriously than they did ; undoubtedly our at- 
tention is more distracted and dissipated. At 
any rate, the American public finds it easier to 
forgive and forget, than to nurse its wrath to 
keep it warm. Our characteristic humor of 
understatement, and our equally characteristic 
humor of overstatement, are both likely to be 
cheery at bottom, though the mere wording 

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Humor and Satire 

may be grim enough. No popular saying is 
more genuinely characteristic of American hu- 
mor than the familiar "Cheer up. The worst 
is yet to come.'* 

Whatever else one may say or leave unsaid 
about American humor, every one realizes that 
it is a fundamentally necessary reaction from 
the pressure of our modern living. Perhaps it 
is a handicap. Perhaps we joke when we should 
be praying. Perhaps we make fun when we 
ought to be setting our shoulders to the wheel. 
But the deeper fact is that most American 
shoulders are set to the wheel too often and 
too long, and if they do not stop for the joke 
they are done for. I have always suspected 
that Mr. Kipling was thinking of American 
humor when he wrote in his well-known lines 
on "The American Spirit": — 

*<So imperturbable he rules 

Unkempt, disreputable, vast — 
And in the teeth of all the schools 
I — I shall save him at the last." 

That is the very secret of the American sense 
of humor : the conviction that something is 
going to save us at the last. Otherwise there 
would be no joke ! It is no accident, surely, 

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The American Mind 

that the man who is increasingly Idolized as the 
most representative of all Americans, the bur- 
den-bearer of his people, the man of sorrows 
and acquainted with grief, should be our most 
inveterate humorist. Let Lincoln have his story 
and his joke, for he had faith in the saving of 
the nation ; and while his Cabinet are waiting 
impatiently to listen to his Proclamation of 
Emancipation, give him another five minutes 
to read aloud to them that new chapter by 
Artemus Ward. 



VI 

Individualism and 
Fellowship 

It would be difficult to find a clearer expres- 
sion of the old doctrine of individualism than 
is uttered by Carlyle in his London lecture on 
"The Hero as Man of Letters." Listen to the 
grim child of Calvinism as he fires his "Annan- 
dale grapeshot " into that sophisticated London 
audience : " Men speak too much about the 
world. . . . The world's being saved will not 
save us ; nor the world's being lost destroy us. 
We should look to ourselves. . . . For the 
saving of the world I will trust confidently to 
the Maker of the world ; and look a little to my 
own saving, which I am more competent to 1 '* 
Carlyle was never more soundly Puritanic, 
never more perfectly within the lines of the 
moral traditions of his race than in these in- 
junctions to let the world go and to care for 
the individual soul. 

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The American Mind 

We are familiar with the doctrine on this 
side of the Atlantic. Here is a single phrase 
from Emerson's Journal of SeTptemher, 1833, 
written on his voyage home from that mem- 
orable visit to Europe where he first made 
Carlyle's acquaintance. " Back again to my- 
self," wrote Emerson, as the five-hundred-ton 
sailing ship beat her way westward for a long 
month across the stormy North Atlantic : — 
"Back again to myself. — A man contains all 
that is needful to his government within him- 
self. He is made a law unto himself. All real 
good or evil that can befall him must be from 
himself. . . . The purpose of life seems to be 
to acquaint a man with himself." 

In the following August he is writing; — 

" Societies, parties, are only incipient stages, 
tadpole states of men, as caterpillars are social, 
but the butterfly not. The true and finished 
man is ever alone." 

On March 23, 1835: — 

" Alone is wisdom. Alone is happiness. 
Society nowadays makes us low-spirited, 
hopeless. Alone is Heaven." 

And once more : — 

" If i^schylus is that man he is taken for, 

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Individualism and Fellowship 

he has not yet done his office when he has edu- 
cated the learned of Europe for a thousand 
years. He is now to approve himself a master 
of dehght to me. If he cannot do that, all his 
fame shall avail him nothing. I were a fool not 
to sacrifice a thousand ^Eschyluses to my in- 
tellectual integrity." 

These quotations have to do with the per- 
sonal hfe. Let me next illustrate the individ- 
ualism of the eighteen-thirties by the attitude 
of two famous individualists toward the prosaic 
question of paying taxes to the State. Carlyle 
told Emerson that he should pay taxes to the 
House of Hanover just as long as the House 
of Hanover had the physical force to collect 
them, — and not a day longer. 

Henry Thoreau was even more recalcitrant. 
Let me quote him : — 

" I have paid no poll tax for six years. I was 
put into a jail once on this account, for one 
night ; and, as I stood considering the walls of 
solid stone, two or three feet thick, the door 
of wood and iron, a foot thick, and the iron 
grating which strained the light, I could not 
help being struck with the foolishness of that 
institution which treated me as if I were mere 

[211 ] 



The American Mind 

flesh and blood and bones, to be locked up. I 
wondered that it should have concluded at 
length that this was the best use it could put 
me to, and had never thought to avail itself of 
my services in some way. I saw that, if there 
was a wall of stone between me and my towns- 
men, there was a still more difficult one to climb 
or break through before they could get to be as 
free as I was. I did not for a moment feel con- 
fined, and the walls seemed a great waste of stone 
and mortar. I felt as if I alone of all my towns- 
men had paid my tax. They plainly did not 
know how to treat me, but behaved like per- 
sons who are underbred. In every threat and 
in every compliment there was a blunder; for 
they thought that my chief desire was to stand 
on the other side of that stone wall. I could not 
but smile to see how industriously they locked 
the door on my meditations, which followed 
them out again without let or hindrance, and 
they were really all that was dangerous. As they 
could not reach me, they had resolved to pun- 
ish my body ; just as boys, if they cannot come 
at some person against whom they have a spite, 
will abuse his dog. I saw that the State was 
half-witted, that it was timid as a lone woman 

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Individualism and Fellowship 

with her silver spoons, and that it did not know 
its friends from its foes, and I lost all my re- 
maining respect for it, and pitied it." 

Here is Thoreau's attitude toward the pro- 
blems of the inner life. The three quotations 
are from his Walden : — 

" Probably I should not consciously and de- 
liberately forsake my particular calling to do 
the good which society demands of me, to save 
the universe from annihilation." 

" I went to the woods because I wished to 
live deliberately, to front only the essential 
facts of life, and see if I could not learn what 
it had to teach, and not, when I came to die, 
discover that I had not lived. I did not wish 
to live what was not life, living is so dear; nor 
did I wish to practice resignation, unless it was 
quite necessary. I wanted to live deep and suck 
out all the marrow of life, to live so sturdily 
and Spartan-like as to put to rout all that was 
not life, to cut a broad swath and shave close, 
to drive life into a corner, and reduce it to its 
lowest terms, and, if it proved to be mean, why 
then to get the whole and genuine meanness 
of it, and publish its meanness to the world ; 
or if it were sublime, to know it by experience, 

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The American Mind 
and be able to give a true account of it in my 



next excursion." 



" It is said that the British Empire is very- 
large and respectable, and that the United States 
are a first-rate power. We do not believe that 
a tide rises and falls behind every man which 
can float the British Empire like a chip, if he 
should ever harbor it in his mind." 

All of these quotations from Emerson and 
Thoreau are but various modes of saying " Let 
the world go." Everybody knows that in later 
crises of American history, both Thoreau and 
Emerson forgot their old preaching of indi- 
vidualism, or at least merged it in the larger 
doctrine of identification of the individual with 
the acts and emotions of the community. And 
nevertheless as men of letters they habitually 
laid stress upon the rights and duties of the 
private person. Upon a hundred brilliant pages 
they preached the gospel that society is in con- 
spiracy against the individual manhood of every 
one of its members. 

They had a right to this doctrine. They came 
by it honestly through long lines of ancestral 
heritage. The republicanism of the seventeenth 
century in the American forests, as well as upon 

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Individualism and Fellowship 

the floor of the English House of Commons, 
had asserted that private persons had the right 
to make and unmake kings. The republican 
theorists of the eighteenth century had insisted 
that life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness 
were the birthright of each individual. This 
doctrine was related, of course, to the doctrine 
of equality. If republicanism teaches that " I 
am as good as others," democracy is forever 
hinting "Others areas good as I." Democracy 
has been steadily extending the notion of rights 
and duties. The first instinct, perhaps, is to 
ask what is right, just, lawful, for me ? Next, 
what is right, just, lawful for my crowd? That 
is to say, my family, my clan, my race, my coun- 
try. The third instinct bids one ask what is 
right and just and lawful, not merely for me, 
and for men like me, but for everybody. And 
when we get that third question properly an- 
swered, we can aflFord to close school-house and 
church and court-room, for this world's work 
will have ended. 

We have already glanced at various phases 
of colonial individualism. We have had a 
glimpse of Cotton Mather prostrate upon the 
dusty floor of his study, agonizing now for 



The American Mind 

himself and now for the countries of Europe ; 
we have watched Jonathan Edwards in his 
solitary ecstasies in the Northampton and the 
Stockbridge woods; we have seen Franklin 
preaching his gospel of personal thrift and of 
getting on in the world. Down to the very- 
verge of the Revolution the American pioneer 
spirit was forever urging the individual to fight 
for his own hand. Each boy on the old farms 
had his own chores to do; each head of a fam- 
ily had to plan for himself. The most tragic 
failure of the individual in those days was the 
poverty or illness which compelled him to "go 
on the town." To be one of the town poor in- 
dicated that the individualistic battle had been 
fought and lost. No one ever dreamed, ap- 
parently, that a time for old-age pensions and 
honorable retiring funds was coming. The feel- 
ing against any form of community assistance 
was like the bitter hatred of the workhouse 
among English laborers of the eighteen-forties. 
The stress upon purely personal qualities 
gave picturesqueness, color, and vigor to the 
early life of the United States. Take the per- 
sons whom Parkman describes in his Oregon 
'Trail, They have the perfect clearness of out- 

[ 216 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

line of the portraits by Walter Scott and the 
great Romantic school of novelists who loved 
to paint pictures of interesting individual men. 
There is the same stress upon individualistic 
portraiture in Irving's Astoria; in the humor- 
ous journals of early travellers in the Southern 
States. It is the secret of the curiosity with 
which we observe the gamblers and miners and 
stage-drivers described by Bret Harte. In the 
rural communities of to-day, in the older por- 
tions of the country, and in the remoter settle- 
ments of the West and Southwest, the indi- 
vidual man has a sort of picturesque, and, as it 
were, artistic value, which the life of cities does 
not allow. The gospel of self-reliance and of 
solitude is not preached more effectively by 
the philosophers of Concord than it is by the 
backwoodsmen, the spies, and the sailors of 
Fenimore Cooper. Individualism as a doctrine 
of perfection for the private person and indi- 
vidualism as a literary creed have thus gone 
hand in hand. " Produce great persons, the rest 
follows,*' cried Walt Whitman. He was think- 
ing at the moment about American society and 
politics. But he believed that the same law held 
good in poetry. Once get your great man and 

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The American Mind 

let him abandon himself to poetry and the 
great poetry will be the result. It was almost 
precisely the same teaching as in Carlyle's lec- 
ture on " The Hero as Poet." 

Well, it is clear enough nowadays that both 
Whitman and Carlyle underrated the value of 
discipHne. The lack of discipline is the chief 
obstacle to effective individualism. The pri- 
vate person must be well trained, or he cannot 
do his work ; and as civilization advances, it 
becomes exceedingly difficult to train the indi- 
vidual without social cooperation. A Paul or a 
Mahomet may discipline his own soul in the 
Desert of Arabia ; he may there learn the les- 
sons that may later make him a leader of men. 
But for the average man and indeed for most 
of the exceptional men, the path to effective- 
ness lies through social and professional dis- 
cipline. Here is where the frontier stage of our 
American life was necessarily weak. We have 
seen that our ancestors gained something, no 
doubt, from their spirit of unconventionality 
and freedom. But they also lost something 
through their disHke for discipline, their indif- 
ference to criticism, their ineradicable tendency, 
whether in business, in diplomacy, in art and 

C 218 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

letters and education, to go "across lots." A 
certain degree of physical orderliness was, in- 
deed, imposed upon our ancestors by the condi- 
tions of pioneer life. The natural prodigality 
and recklessness of frontier existence was here 
and there sharply checked. Order is essential 
in a camp, and the thin line of colonies was 
all camping. A certain instinct for order under- 
lay that resourcefulness which impresses every 
reader of our history. Did the colonist need a 
tool ? He learned to make it himself. Isola- 
tion from the mother country was a stimulus 
\^ to the inventive imagination. Before long they 
^- were maintaining public order in the same 
^' ingenious fashion in which they kept house. 
Appeals to London took too much time. " We 
send a complaint this year," ran the saying, 
"the next year they send to inquire, the third 
year the ministry is changed." No wonder that 
resourcefulness bred independent action, stim- 
ulated the Puritan taste for individualism, and 
led the way to self-government. 

Yet who does not know that the inherent 
instinct for political order may be accompanied 
by mental disorderliness? Even your modern 
Englishman — as the saying goes — "muddles 

[ 219 ] 



The American Mind 

through/* The minds of our American fore- 
fathers were not always lucid. The mysticism 
of the New England Calvinists sometimes bred 
fanaticism. The practical and the theoretical 
were queerly blended. The essential unorder- 
liness of the American mind is admirably illus- 
trated by that " Father of all the Yankees," 
Benjamin Franklin. No student of FrankHn*s 
life fails to be impressed by its happy casual- 
ness, its cheerful flavor of the rogue-romance. 
Gil Bias himself never drifted into and out of 
an adventure with a more offhand and imper- 
turbable adroitness. FrankHn went through life 
with the joyous inventiveness of the amateur. 
He had the amateur's enthusiasm, coupled with 
a clairvoyant penetration into technical prob- 
lems such as few amateurs have possessed. With 
all of his wonderful patience towards other men, 
Franklin had in the realm of scientific experi- 
ment something of the typical impatience of 
the mere dabbler. He was inclined to lose in- 
terest in the special problem before it was worked 
out. His large, tolerant intelligence was often 
as unorderly as his papers and accounts. He 
was a wonderful colonial Jack-of-all-trades ; 
with a range of suggestion, a resourcefulness, 

[ 220 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

a knack of assimilation, a cosmopolitan many- 
sidedness, which has left us perpetually his debt- 
ors. Under different surroundings, and disci- 
plined by a more severe and orderly training, 
Franklin might easily have developed the very 
highest order of professional scientific achieve- 
ment. His natural talent for organization of 
men and institutions, his " early projecting pub- 
lic spirit," his sense of the lack of formal edu- 
cational advantages in the colonies, made him 
the founder of the Philadelphia Academy, the 
successful agitator for public libraries. Acade- 
micism, even in the narrow sense, owes much to 
this LL.D. of St. Andrews, D.C.L. of Oxford, 
and intimate associate of French academicians. 
But one smiles a little, after all, to see the bland 
printer in this academic company : he deserves 
his place there, indeed, but he is something 
more and other than his associates. He is the 
type of youthful, inexhaustible colonial Amer- 
ica; reckless of precedent, self-taught, splen- 
didly alive ; worth, to his day and generation, a 
dozen born academicians ; and yet suggesting 
by his very imperfections, that the Americans 
of a later day, working under different condi- 
tions, are bound to develop a sort of profes- 

[ 221 ] 



The American Mind 

sional skill, of steady, concentrated, ordered in- 
tellectual activity, for which Franklin possessed 
the potential capacity rather than the opportu- 
nity and the desire. 

Yet there were latent lines of order, hints and 
prophecies of a coming fellowship, running 
deep and straight beneath the confused surface 
of the preoccupied colonial conciousness. In an- 
other generation we see the rude Western de- 
mocracy asserting itself in the valley of the Mis- 
sissippi. This breed of pioneers, like their 
fathers on the Atlantic coast line, could turn 
their hands to anything, because they must. 
"The average man," says Mr. Herbert Croly, 
" without any special bent or qualifications, was 
in the pioneer states the useful man. In that 
country it was sheer waste to spend much en- 
ergy upon tasks which demanded skill, pro- 
longed experience, high technical standards, or 
exclusive devotion. . . . No special equipment 
was required. The farmer was obliged to be all 
kinds of a rough mechanic. The business man 
was merchant, manufacturer, and storekeeper. 
Almost everybody was something of a poli- 
tician. The number of parts which a man of 
energy played in his time was astonishingly 

[ 222 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

large. Andrew Jackson was successively a law- 
yer,] udge, planter, merchant, general, politician, 
and statesman ; and he played most of these 
parts with conspicuous success. In such a so- 
ciety a man who persisted in one job, and who 
applied the most rigorous and exacting stand- 
ards to his work, was out of place and really in- 
efficient. His finished product did not serve its 
temporary purpose much better than did the 
current careless and hasty product,, and his 
higher standards and peculiar ways constituted 
an implied criticism on the easy methods of his 
neighbors. He interfered with the rough good- 
fellowship which naturally arises among a group 
of men who submit good naturedly and uncriti- 
cally to current standards. It is no wonder, con- 
sequently, that the pioneer Democracy viewed 
with distrust and aversion the man with a spe- 
cial vocation and high standards of achieve- 
ment." 

The truth of this comment is apparent to 
everybody. It explans the still lingering popu- 
lar suspicion of the " academic " type of man. 
But we are likely to forget that back of all that 
easy versatility and reckless variety of effort 
there was some sound and patient and construc- 

[ 223 ] 



The American Mind 

tive thinking. Lincoln used to describe himself 
humorously, slightingly, as a "mast-fed " law- 
yer, one who had picked up in the woods the 
scattered acorns of legal lore. It was a true 
enough description, but after all, there were 
very few college-bred lawyers in the Eighth Illi- 
nois Circuit or anywhere else who could hold 
their own, even in a purely professional strug- 
gle, with that long-armed logician from the 
backwoods. 

There was once a " mast-fed " novelist in 
this country, who scandalously slighted his 
academic opportunities, went to sea, went into 
the navy, went to farming, and then went into 
novel-writing to amuse himself. He cared no- 
thing and knew nothing about conscious liter- 
ary art; his style is diffuse, his syntax the 
despair of school-teachers, and many of his 
characters are bores. But once let him strike 
the trail of a story, and he follows it like his 
own Hawkeye ; put him on salt water or in the 
wilderness, and he knows rope and paddle, axe 
and rifle, sea and forest and sky ; and he knows 
his road home to the right ending of a story 
by an instinct as sure as an Indian's. Profes- 
sional novelists like Balzac, professional critics 

[ 224 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

like Sainte-Beuve, stand amazed at Fenimore 
Cooper's skill and power. The true engineer- 
ing and architectural lines are there. They 
were not painfully plotted beforehand, like 
George Eliot's. Cooper took, like Scott, "the 
easiest path across country," just as a bee- 
hunter seems to take the easiest path through 
the woods. But the bee-hunter, for all his ap- 
parent laziness, never loses sight of the air- 
drawn line, marked by the homing bee; and 
joMT Last of the Mohicans will be instinctively, 
inevitably right, while your Daniel Deronda 
will be industriously wrong. 

Cooper literally builded better than he knew. 
Obstinately unacademic in his temper and 
training, he has won the suffrages of the most 
fastidious and academic judges of excellence in 
his profession. The secret is, I suppose, that 
the lawlessness, the amateurishness, the indif- 
ference to standards were on the surface, — ap- 
parent to everybody, — the soundness and 
rightness of his practice were unconscious. 

Franklin and Lincoln and Cooper, there- 
fore, may be taken as striking examples of in- 
dividuals trained in the old happy-go-lucky 
way, and yet with marked capacities for social- 

[ 225 ] 



The American Mind 

ization, for fellowship. They succeeded, even 
by the vulgar tests of success, in spite of their 
lack of discipline. But for most men the chief 
obstacle to effective labor even as individuals 
is the lack of thoroughgoing training. 

It is scarcely necessary to add that there are 
vast obstacles in the way of individualism as a 
\/ working theory of society. Carlyle*s theory of 
f^ " Hero Worship " has fewer adherents than 
for half a century. It is picturesque, — that 
conception of a great, sincere man and of a 
world reverencing him and begging to be led 
by him. But the difficulty is that contempo- 
rary democracy does not say to the Hero, as 
Carlyle thought it must say, "Govern me ! I am 
mad and miserable, and cannot govern myself! " 

Democracy says to the Hero, " Thank you 
very much, but this is our affair. Join us, if 
you like. We shall be glad of your company. 
But we are not looking for governors. We 
propose to govern ourselves." 

Even from the point of view of literature 
and art, — fields of activity where the individ- 
ual performer has often been felt to be quite 
independent of his audience, — it is quite evi- 
dent nowadays that the old theory of individ- 

[ 226 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

ualism breaks down. Even your lyric poet, 
who more than any other artist stands or sings 
alone, falls easily into mere lyric eccentricity 
if he is not bound to his fellows by wholesome 
and normal ties. In fact, this lyric eccentricity, 
weakness, wistfulness, is one of the notable de- 
fects of American poetry. We have always been 
lacking in the more objective forms of literary 
art, like epic and drama. Poe, and the imita- 
tors of Poe, have been regarded too often by 
our people as the normal type of poet. One 
must not forget the silent solitary ecstasies 
that have gone into the making of enduring 
lyric verse, but our literature proves abun- 
dantly how soon sweetness may turn to an 
Emily Dickinson strain of morbidness; how 
fatally the lovely becomes transformed into the 
queer. The history of the American short 
story furnishes many similar examples. The 
artistic intensity of a Hawthorne, his ethical 
and moral preoccupations, are all a part of the 
creed of individualistic art. But both Haw- 
thorne and Poe would have written, — one dare 
not say better stories, but at least greater and 
broader and more human stories, — if they 
had not been forced to walk so constantly in 

[ 227 ] 



The American Mind 

solitary pathways. That fellowship in artistic 
creation which has characterized some of the 
greatest periods of art production was some- 
thing wholly absent from the experience of 
these gifted and lonely men. Even Emerson 
and Thoreau wrote " whim " over their portals 
more often than any artist has the privilege to 
write it. Emerson never had any thorough 
training, either in philosophy, theology, or 
history. He admits it upon a dozen smiling 
pages. Perhaps it adds to his purely personal 
charm, just as Montaigne's confession of his in- 
tellectual and moral weaknesses heightens our 
fondness for the Prince of Essayists. But the 
deeper fact is that not only Emerson and Tho- 
reau, Poe and Hawthorne, but practically every 
American writer and artist from the beginning 
has been forced to do his work without the sus- 
taining and heartening touch of national fel- 
lowship and pride. Emerson himself felt the 
chilling poverty in the intellectual and emo- 
tional life of the country. He betrays it in this 
striking passage from his Journaly about the 
sculptor Greenough: — 

" What interest has Greenough to make a 
good statue ? Who cares whether it is good ? 

[ 228 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

A few prosperous gentlemen and ladies ; but 
the Universal Yankee Nation roaring in the 
capitol to approve or condemn would make his 
eye and hand and heart go to a new tune." 

Those words were written in 1836, but we 
are still waiting for that new national anthem, 
sustaining the heart and the voice of the indi- 
vidual artist. Yet there are signs that it is com- 
ing- 
It is obvious that the day for the old indi- 
vidualism has passed. Whether one looks at 
art and literature or at the general activities of 
American society, it is clear that the isolated in- 
dividual is incompetent to carry on his neces- 
sary tasks. This is not saying that we have 
outgrown the individual. We shall never out- 
grow the individual. We need for every page 
of literature and for every adequate perform- 
ance of society more highly perfected individ- 
uals. Some one said of Edgar Allan Poe that 
he did not know enough to be a great poet. 
All around us and every day we find individ- 
uals who do not know enough for their speci- 
fic job ; men who do not love enough, men in 
whom the power of will is too feeble. Such 
men, as individuals, must know and love and 

[ 229 ] 



The American Mind 

will more adequately ; and this not merely to 
perfect their functioning as individuals, but to 
fulfill their obligations to contemporary soci- 
li. ety. A true spiritual democracy will never be 

reached until highly trained individuals are 
united in the bonds of fraternal feeling. Every 
individual defect in training, defect in aspira- 
tion, defect in passion, becomes ultimately a 
defect in society. 

Let us turn, then, to those conditions of 
American society which have prepared the way 
for, and foreshadowed, a more perfect fellow- 
ship. We shall instantly perceive the relation 
of these general social conditions to the speci- 
fic performances of our men of letters. We have 
repeatedly noted that our most characteristic 
literature is what has been called a citizen liter- 
ature. It is the sort of writing which springs 
from a sense of the general needs of the com- 
munity and which has had for its object the safe- 
guarding or the betterment of the community. 
Aside from a few masterpieces of lyric poetry, 
and aside from the short story as represented 
by such isolated artists as Poe and Hawthorne, 
our literature as a whole has this civic note. It 
may be detected in the first writings of the 

C 230 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

colonists. Captain John Smith's angry order 
at Jamestown, " He that will not work neither 
let him eat/* is one of the planks in the plat- 
form of democracy. Under the trying and de- 
pressing conditions of that disastrous settle- 
ment at Eden in Martin Cbuzzlewit it is the 
quick wits and the brave heart of Mark Tap- 
ley which prove him superior to his employer. 
The same sermon is preached in Mr. Barrie's 
play, 'The Admirable Crichton : cast away upon 
the desert island, the butler proves himself a 
better man than his master. This is the mo- 
tive of a very modern play, but it may be il- 
lustrated a hundred times in the history of the 
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries in Amer- 
ica. The practical experiences of the colonists 
confirmed them in their republican theories. It 
is true that they held to a doctrine of religious 
and political individualism. But the moment 
these theories were put to work in the wilder- 
ness a new order of things decreed that this in- 
dividualism should be modified in the direction 
of fellowship. Calvinism itself, for all of its in- 
sistence upon the value of the individual soul, 
taught also the principle of the equality of all 
souls before God. It was thus that the Insli- 

[ ^3^ ] 



The American Mind 

tutes of Calvin became one of the charters of 
democracy. The democratic drift in the writ- 
ings of Franklin and Jefferson is too well known 
to need any further comment. The triumph 
of the rebellious colonists of 1776 was a tri- 
umph of democratic principles ; and although 
aTory reaction came promptly, although Ham- 
iltonianism came to stay as a beneficent check 
to over-radical, populistic theories, the history 
of the last century and a quarter has abundantly 
shown the vitality and the endurance of demo- 
cratic ideas. 

One may fairly say that the decade in which 
American democracy revealed its most ugly 
and quarrelsome aspect was the decade of the 
eighteen-thirties. That was the decade when 
Washington Irvingand Fenimore Cooper came 
home from long sojurns in Europe. They 
found themselves confronted at once by sensi- 
tive, suspicious neighbors who hated England 
and Europe and had a lurking or open hostil- 
ity towards anythingthatsavoredof Old World 
culture. Yet in that very epoch when English 
visitors were passing their most harsh and cen- 
sorious verdict upon American culture, Emer- 
son was writing in his Journal (June 18, 1834) 

[ 232 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

a singular prophecy to the effect that the evils 
of our democracy, so far as literature was con- 
cerned, were to be cured by the remedy of 
more democracy. Is it not striking that he turns 
away from the universities and the traditional 
culture of New England and looks towards the 
Jacksonism of the new West to create a new 
and native American literature ? Here is the 
passage : — 

" We all lean on England ; scarce a verse, 
a page, a newspaper, but is writ in imitation of 
English forms; our very manners and conver- 
sation are traditional, and sometimes the life 
seems dying out of all literature, and this 
enormous paper currency of Words is accepted 
instead. I suppose the evil may be cured by 
this rank rabble party, the Jacksonism of the 
country, heedless of English and of all liter- 
ature — a stone cut out of the ground without 
hands ; — they may root out the hollow dilet- 
tantism of our cultivation in the coarsest way, 
and the new-born may begin again to frame 
their own world with greater advantage." 

From that raw epoch of the eighteen-thirties 
on to the Civil War, one may constantly detect 
in American writing the accents of democratic 



The American Mind 

radicalism. Partly, no doubt, it was a heritage 
of the sentiment of the French Revolution. 
" My father," said John Greenleaf Whittier, 
** really believed in the Preamble of the Bill of 
Rights, which re-affirmed the Declaration of 
Independence." So did the son ! Equally clear 
in the writings of those thirty years are echoes 
of the English radicalism which had so much 
in common with the democratic movement 
across the English Channel. The part which 
English thinkers and English agitators played 
in securing for America the fruits of her own 
democratic principles has never been ade- 
quately acknowledged. 

That the outcome of the Civil War meant 
a triumph of democratic ideas as against aristo- 
cratic privilege, no one can doubt. There were 
no stancher adherents of the democratic idea 
than our intellectual aristocrats. The best 
Union editorials at the time of the Civil War, 
says James Ford Rhodes, were written by schol- 
ars like Charles Eliot Norton andjames Russell 
Lowell. I think it was Lowell who once said, 
in combatting the old aristocratic notion of 
white man supremacy, that no gentleman is 
willing to accept privileges that are inaccessible 

[ 234 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

to other men. This is precisely like the famous 
sentence of Walt Whitman which first arrested 
the attention of " Golden Rule Jones," the 
mayor of Toledo, and which made him not 
only a Whitmaniac for the rest of his life but 
one of the most useful of American citizens. 
The line was, " I will accept nothing which all 
may not have their counterpart of on the same 
terms." 

This instinct of fellowship cannot be sepa- 
rated, of course, from the older instincts of 
righteousness and justice. It involves, how- 
ever, more than giving the other man his due. 
It means feeling towards him as towards an- 
other "fellow." It involves the sentiment of 
partnership. Historians of early mining life in 
California have noted the new phase of social 
feeling in the mining-camps which followed 
upon the change from the pan — held and 
shaken by the solitary miner — to the cradle, 
which required the cooperation of at least two 
men. It was when the cradle came in that the 
miners first began to say " partner." As the 
cradle gave way to placer mining, larger and 
larger schemes of cooperation came into use. 
In fact. Professor Royce has pointed out in his 

[ '^3S ] 



The American Mind 

History of California that the whole lesson of 
California history is precisely the lesson most 
necessary to be learned by the country as a 
whole, namely, that the phase of individual 
gain-getting and individualistic power always 
leads to anarchy and reaction, and that it 
becomes necessary, even in the interests of 
effective individualism itself, to recognize the 
compelling and ultimate authority of society. 
What went on in California between 1849 
and 1852 is precisely typical of what is going 
on everywhere to-day. American men and 
women are learning, as we say, " to get to- 
gether." It is the distinctly twentieth-century 
programme. We must all learn the art of get- 
ting together, not merely to conserve the in- 
terests of literature and art and society, but 
to preserve the individual himself in his just 
rights. Any one who misunderstands the depth 
and the scope of the present political restless- 
ness which is manifested in every section of the 
country, misunderstands the American instinct 
for fellowship. It is a law of that fellowship 
that what is right and legitimate for me is right 
and legitimate for the other fellow also. The 
American mind and the American conscience 

[ 236 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

are becoming socialized before our very eyes. 
American art and literature must keep pace 
with this socialization of the intelligence and 
the conscience, or they will be no longer repre- 
sentative of the true America. 

Literary illustrations of this spirit of frater- 
nalism lie close at hand. They are to be found 
here and there even in the rebellious, well-nigh 
anarchic, individualism of the Concord men. 
They are to be found throughout the prose 
and verse of Whittier. No one has preached 
a truer or more effective gospel of fellowship 
than Longfellow, whose poetry has been one 
of the pervasive influences in American demo- 
cracy, although Longfellow had but little to 
say about politics and never posed in a slouch 
hat and with his trousers tucked into his boots. 
Fellowship is taught in the Biglow Papers of 
Lowell and the stories of Mrs. Stowe. It is 
wholly absent from the prose and verse of Poe, 
and it imparts but a feeble warmth to the del- 
icately written pages of Hawthorne. But in the 
books written for the great common audience 
of American men and women, like the novels 
of Winston Churchill ; and in the plays which 
have scored the greatest popular successes, like 

[ 237 ] 



/ 



The American Mind 

those of Denman Thompson, Bronson How- 
ard, Gillette, Augustus Thomas, the doctrine of 
fellowship is everywhere to be traced. It is in 
the poems of James Whitcomb Riley and of 
Sam Walter Foss ; in the work of hundreds of 
lesser known writers of verse and prose who 
have echoed Foss*s sentiment about living in 
a " house by the side of the road " and being 
a "friend of man." 

To many readers the supreme literary ex- 
ample of the gospel of American fellowship 
is to be found in Walt Whitman. One will 
look long before one finds a more consistent 
or a nobler doctrine of fellowship than is 
chanted in Leaves of Grass. It is based upon 
individualism ; the strong body and the pos- 
sessed soul, sure of itself amid the whirling of 
the " quicksand years *' ; but it sets these strong 
persons upon the " open road '* in comrade- 
ship ; it is the sentiment of comradeship which 
creates the indissolubleunion of" these States "; 
and the States, in turn, in spite of every 
" alarmist," " partialist," or " infidel," are to 
stretch out unsuspicious and friendly hands of 
fellowship to the whole world. Anybody has 
the right to call Leaves of Grass poor poetry, 

[ 238 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

if he pleases ; but nobody has the right to deny 
its magnificent Americanism. 

It is not merely in literature that this mes- 
sage of fellowship is brought to our generation. 
Let me quote a few sentences from the recent 
address of George Gray Barnard, the sculptor, 
in explaining the meaning of his marble groups 
now placed at the entrance to the Capitol 
of Pennsylvania. " I resolved," says Barnard, 
" that I would build such groups as should 
stand at the entrance to the People's temple 
. . . the home of those visions of the ever-wid- 
ening and broadening brotherhood that gives 
to life its dignity and its meaning. Life is told 
in terms of labor. It is fitting that labor, its tri- /\ 

umphs, its message, should be told to those 
who gaze upon a temple of the people. The 
worker is the hope of all the future. The needs 
of the worker, his problems, his hopes, his un- 
told longings, his sacrifices, his triumphs, all 
of these are the field of the art of the future. 
Slowly we are groping our way towards the new 
brotherhood, and when that day dawns, men 
will enter a world made a paradise by labor. 
Labor makes us kin. It is for this reason that 
there has been placed at the entrance of this 

[ 239 ] 



The American Mind 

great building the message of the Adam and 
Eve of the future, the message of labor and of 
fraternity." 

That there are defects in this gospel and 
programme of American fellowship, every one 
is aware. If the obstacle to effective individual- 
ism is lack of discipline, the obstacles to effect- 
ive fellowship are vagueness, crankiness, in- 
efficiency, and the relics of primal selfishness. 
Nobody in our day has preached the tidings 
of universal fellowship more fervidly and pow- 
erfully than Tolstoi. Yet when one asks the 
great Russian, " What am I to do as a member 
of this fellowship ? " Tolstoi gives but a con- 
fused and impractical answer. He applies to 
the complex and contradictory facts of our 
contemporary civilization the highest test and 
standard known to him : namely, the prin- 
ciples of the New Testament. But if you ask 
him precisely how these principles are to be 
made the working programme of to-morrow, 
the Russian mysticism and fanaticism settle 
over him like a fog. We pass Tolstoians on 
the streets of our American cities every day ; 
they have the eyes of dreamers, of those who 
would build, if they could, a new Heaven and 

[ 240 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

a new Earth. But they do not know exactly 
how to go about it. Our practical Western 
minds seize upon some actual plan for con- 
structive labor. Miss Jane Addams organizes 
her settlements in the slums ; Booker Wash- 
ington gives his race models of industrial edu- 
cation; President Eliot has a theory of univer- 
sity reform and then struggles successfully for 
forty years to put that theory into practice. 
Compared with the concrete performance of 
such social workers as these, the gospel accord- 
ing to Whitman and Tolsto'i is bound to seem 
vague in its outlines, and ineffective in its con- 
crete results. That such a gospel attracts cranks 
and eccentrics of all sorts is not to be wondered 
at. They come and go, but the deeper con- 
ceptions of fraternalism remain. 

A further obstacle to the progress of fellow- ^ 

ship lies in selfishness. But let us see how even 
the coarser and rawer and cruder traits of the 
American character may be related to the 
spirit of common endeavor which is slowly 
transforming our society, and modifying, be- 
fore our eyes, our contemporary art and liter- 
ature. 

" The West," says James Bryce, " is the 

[ 241 ] 



/ 



The American Mind 

most American part of America, that is to say 
the part where those features which distinguish 
America from Europe come out in the strong- 
est reHef.'* We have already noted in our study 
of American romance how the call of the West 
represented for a while the escape from reality. 
The individual, following that retreating hori- 
zon which we name the West, found an escape 
from convention and from social law. Beyond 
the Mississippi or beyond the Rockies meant 
to him that " somewheres east of Suez " where 
the Ten Commandments are no longer to be 
found, where the individual has free rein. But 
by and by comes the inevitable reaction, the 
return to reaHty. The pioneer sobers down ; 
he finds that " the Ten Commandments will not 
budge" ; he sees the need of law and order; he 
organizes a vigilance committee; he impanels 
a jury, even though the old Spanish law does 
not recognize a jury. The new land settles to 
its rest. The output of the gold mines shrinks 
into insignificance when compared with the cash 
value of crops of hay and potatoes. The old 
picturesque individualism yields to a new so- 
cial order, to the conception of the rights of 
the state. The story of the West is thus an 

[ 24^ ] 



u 



Individualism and Fellowship 

epitome of the individual human life as well as 
the history of the United States. 

We have been living through a period where 
the mind of the West has seemed to be the 
typical national mind. We have been indiffer- 
ent to traditions. We have overlooked the de- 
fective training of the individual, provided he 
" made good." We have often, as in the free 
silver craze, turned our back upon universal 
experience. We have been recklessly deaf to 
the teachings of history ; we have spoken of the 
laws of literature and art as if they were mere 
conventions designed to oppress the free ac- 
tivity of the artist. Typical utterances of our 
writers are Jack London's " I want to get away 
from the musty grip of the past," and Frank 
Norris's " I do not want to write literature, I 
want to write life." 

The soul of the West, and a good deal of 
the soul of America, has been betrayed in words 
like those. Not to share this hopefulness of the 
West, its stress upon feeling rather than think- 
ing, its superb confidence, is to be ignorant of 
the constructive forces of the nation. The hu- 
mor of the West, its democracy , its rough kind- 
ness, its faith in the people, its generous notion 

[ 243 ] 



The American Mind 

of " the square deal for everybody/' its eleva- 
tion of the man above the dollar, are all typi- 
cal of the American way of looking at the world. 
Typical also, is its social solidarity, its swift 
emotionalism of the masses. It is the Western 
interest in the ethical aspect of social move- 
ments that is creating some of the moving forces 
in American society to-day. Experiment sta- 
tions of all kinds flourish on that soil. Chicago 
newspapers are more alive to new ideas than 
the newspapers of New York or Boston. No 
one can understand the present-day America 
if he does not understand the men and women 
who live between the Allegheny Mountains 
and the Rocky Mountains. They have worked 
out, more successfully than the composite pop- 
ulation of the East, a general theory of the 
relation of the individual to society ; in other 
words, a combination of individualism with 
fellowship. 

To draw up an indictment against this typi- 
cal section of our country is to draw up an in- 
dictment against our people as a whole. And 
yet one who studies the literature and art pro- 
duced in the great Mississippi Valley will see, 
I believe, that the needs of the West are the 

[ 244 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

real needs of America. Take that commonness 
of mind and tone, which friendly foreign critics, 
from De Tocqueville to Bryce, have indicated 
as one of the dangers of our democracy. This 
commonness of mind and tone is often one of 
the penalties of fellowship. It may mean a 
levelling down instead of a levelling up. 

Take the tyranny of the majority, — to which 
Mr. Bryce has devoted one of his most sug- 
gestive chapters. You begin by recognizing the 
rights of the majority. You end by believing 
that the majority must be right. You cease to 
struggle against it. In other words, you yield 
to what Mr. Bryce calls " the fatalism of the 
multitude." The individual has a sense of in- 
significance. It is vain to oppose the general 
current. It is easier to acquiesce and to submit. 
The sense of personal responsibility lessens. 
What is the use of battling for one*s own opin- 
ions when one can already see that the multi- 
tude is on the other side ? The greater your 
democratic faith in the ultimate rightness of 
the multitude, the less perhaps your individual 
power of will. The easier is it for you to be- 
lieve that everything is coming out right, whe- 
ther you put your shoulder to the wheel or not. 

[ ^45 ] 



The American Mind 

The problem of overcoming these evils is 
nothing less than the problem of spiritualizing 
democracy. There are some of our hero-wor- 
shipping people who think that that vast result 
can still be accomplished by harking back to 
some such programme as the "great man" 
theory of Carlyle. Another theory of spiritu- 
alizing democracy, no less familiar to the stu- 
dent of nineteen-century literature, is what is 
called "the divine average" doctrine of Walt 
Whitman. The average man is to be taught 
the glory of his walk and trade. Round every 
head there is to be an aureole. " A common 
wave of thought and joy, lifting mankind 
again," is to make us forget the old distinction 
between the individual and the social group. 
We are all to be the sons of the morning. 

We must not pause to analyze or to illus- 
trate these two theories. Carlyle's theory seems 
to me to be outworn, and Whitman's theory 
is premature. But it is clear that they both 
admit that the mass of men are as yet incom- 
pletely spiritualized, not yet raised to their full 
stature. Unquestionably, our American life is, 
in European eyes at least, monotonously uni- 
form. It is touched with self-complacency. It 

[ 246] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

is too intent upon material progress. It confuses 
bigness with greatness. It is unrestful. It is 
marked by intellectual impatience. Our authors 
are eager to write life rather than literature. But 
they are so eager that they overlook the need 
of literary discipline. They do not learn to 
write literature and therefore most of them are 
incapable of interpreting life. They escape, per- 
haps, from "the musty grip of the past," but 
in so doing they refuse to learn the inexorable 
lessons of the past. Hence the fact that our 
books lack power, that they are not commen- 
surate with the living forces of the country. 
The unconscious, moral, and spiritual life of 
the nation is not back of them, making " eye 
and hand and heart go to a new tune." 

If we could have that, we should ask no 
more, for we believe in the nation. I heard a 
doctor say, the other day, that a man's chief les- 
son was to pull his brain down into his spinal 
cord ; that is to say, to make his activities not 
so much the result of conscious thought and 
volition, as of unconscious, reflex action ; to 
stop thinking and willing, and simply do what 
one has to do. May there not be a hint here 
of the ultimate relation of the individual to the 

[ 247 ] 



The American Mind 

social organism ; the relation of our literature 
to our national character? There is a period, 
no doubt, when the individual must painfully 
question himself, test his powers, and acquire 
the sense of his own place in the world. But 
there also comes a more mature period when he 
takes that place unconsciously, does his work 
almost without thinking about it, as if it were 
not his work at all. The brain has gone down 
into the spinal cord ; the man is functioning as 
apart of the organism of society ; he has ceased 
to question, to plan, to decide; it is instinct 
that does his work for him. 
vLiterature and art, at their noblest, function 
in that instinctive way. They become the un- 
conscious expression of a civilization. A na- 
tion passes out of its adolescent preoccupation 
with plans and with materials. It learns to do 
its work, precisely as Goethe bade the artist do 
his task, without talking about it. We, too, 
shall outgrow in time our questioning, our self- 
analysis, our futile comparison of ourselves 
with other nations, our self-conscious study of 
our own national character. We shall not for- 
get the distinction between " each" and " all," 
but " all " will increasingly be placed at the ser- 

[ 248 ] 



Individualism and Fellowship 

vice of " each.V With fellowship based upon 
individualism, and with individualism ever 
leading to fellowship, America will perform 
its vital tasks, and its literature will be the 
unconscious and beautiful utterance of its 
inner life. 



THE END. 



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